Biden in Asia: Holding pattern

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

THE agenda for this week’s scheduled visit to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul by Joe Biden, America’s vice-president, was hijacked before he got there. America had already given a clear signal of its opposition to a new Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea announced by China on November 23rd. It had sent two B-52 bombers through the new zone without notification. Mr Biden’s visit became a chance to calm things down.

In Tokyo Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, had hoped that his American ally would call for China’s ADIZ to be scrapped. Its imposition was seen as a sharp escalation of China’s dispute with Japan over islets that Japan calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyus. The ADIZ also covers territory claimed by South Korea, and overlaps with both countries’ own air identification zones.

In fact Mr Biden stopped short of demanding that China rescind the ADIZ. America says it takes no position on the dispute over sovereignty over the Senkakus. But, he said, it was “deeply concerned by the attempt to unilaterally change the status quo in the East China Sea”. Crisis-management mechanisms to avoid accidents, he added, are now the priority. These could include hotlines and procedures following accidental collisions.

To expect more from him just before he went to Beijing was unrealistic, an adviser to Mr Abe admits. After all America had sent a strong message of support for Japan in the shape of the B-52s, reinforced this week by the arrival in Okinawa of two newly designed anti-submarine surveillance aircraft. But Japan was disappointed, as it was by America’s instructions to its commercial airlines to follow Chinese rules in the new ADIZ. The Japanese government has insisted that its own airlines fly in the zone without notification, ignoring the possible risk to passengers.

In Beijing Mr Biden held more than five hours of wide-ranging talks with Xi Jinping, China’s president, during which he told him America does not recognise the new zone. Just before his visit, China’s defence ministry took some modest steps to defuse tensions. A spokesman gave some reassurance about how China will enforce the zone. Fighter planes, he said, are “unnecessary” as long as aircraft entering it pose no threat. Contradicting claims by China’s government, America and Japan both maintain that China has not scrambled fighter jets in response to their aircrafts’ movements in the ADIZ.

Mr Biden flew from Beijing to Seoul. The inclusion in China’s zone of a reef, known as Ieodo, claimed by both South Korea and China, has prompted South Korea to contemplate extending its own air-defence zone to cover it as well. Choi Jong-Kun, of Yonsei University in Seoul, worries that tinkering with South Korea’s zone would lend legitimacy to China’s. It is also likely to meet objections from America—and probably Japan.

Tensions have eased but are still running high. The risk that Mr Biden repeatedly highlighted was of unintended conflict following an accidental clash. If his trip has laid the groundwork for the emergency-communication mechanism that he suggested, it will have achieved much.

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