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| P-8A Poseidon (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Zachary Keck
The U.S. has a dangerous tendency of excusing Chinese aggression by blaming it on rogue PLA members.
The U.S. fears that Chinese pilots are going rogue.
As The Diplomat previously reported, on Friday the U.S. accused a Chinese pilot of conducting a “dangerous intercept” of a U.S. Navy spy plane last week in international airspace over the South China Sea. China vehemently denied the charges, calling them “totally groundless,” and claiming that the PLA pilot had acted professionally and maintained a safe distance from the U.S. aircraft. Despite denying the incident occurred at all, China blamed it on America’s “massive and frequent close-in surveillance of China.”
The U.S. responded nearly immediately. According to the Wall Street Journal, after Friday’s announcement, “U.S. officials later said that at least three similarly provocative incidents occurred earlier this year in the same general location, all in international airspace.” The U.S. quietly issued official démarches to China following those earlier incidents, and apparently was unhappy with Beijing’s response (or lack thereof). Presumably, it therefore decided to go public with its complaints, under the continued misguided belief that publicly shaming China will garner results.
At the same time, the WSJ notes that the U.S. is perplexed about the entire situation. The newspaper summarizes unnamed U.S. officials as saying that they cannot figure out why the dangerous intercepts are happening in the same location, but do not believe the Chinese government or military is behind them. Instead, Washington believes they are the handiwork of “a rogue pilot or group of pilots in a squadron responsible for intercepts in the South China Sea.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat