The continuing quarrel between China and the US over the downed American spy plane has been getting a lot of attention from the press. Negotiations have reached an impasse. The US has tacitly offered to drop its protests over boarding and searching the plane if the crew is returned, and the Chinese have indicated they'll return the crew and let the incident slide if America admits responsibility for the collision of the spy plane and a fighter sent up to harass it, but the US refuses to make such an admission. (This may not be misplaced pride; I gather a corollary of such an admission is the cessation of similar flights within 200 miles of China, rather than the 50-mile limit of international waters. This distance includes the whole of Taiwan.)
I don't think anyone other than the crew and the high commands will ever know with certainty which plane, if either, is responsible for the crash and death of the Chinese pilot, and, thus, whether the US should apologize. News services report that planes in the area regularly play ?chicken;? something was bound to happen sooner or later. What strikes me is how blasé the treatment of the subsequent confrontation has been. The extensive coverage has only underlined that the issue doesn't matter. China will board ? or has boarded ? the plane to snitch a few technological secrets, America will continue to spy, both sides will huff and puff a bit, and all will be forgotten. (Let's hope the crew and their families are returned before, rather than after, they too are forgotten.)
The participants are remarkably low-key, almost friendly about everything. ?Yeah, yeah, you look in the plane, we get our crew, everybody's cool about it.? Indeed, I get the impression that both sides are cooperating to find a face-saving compromise, rather than facing one another down. At first blush, that's not normal for power politics, but the more I think about it, the more I see a general trend towards pacifism.
Ancient, medieval, and renaissance kingdoms would go to war at the drop of a hat. When the colonial era got into full swing, Europeans started to work to keep conflicts abroad. They didn't always succeed, but despite almost continual skirmishes in the colonies, there was a general awareness of the destructiveness of war, and honest attempts to keep it in distant continents. Once the industrial revolution put some real teeth into warfare, and once governments woke up to the fact, they started working in earnest to defuse the colonial crises of 1905. The general public despised war after WWI. (WWII was something of a last gasp of the belief in war as a policy actively to be pursued, and that only for a few nations.) Atomic weapons enfeebled war as an instrument of politics, and with good reason, but cold war negotiations were anything but relaxed. Where did this casual diplomatic attitude come from?
I think, perhaps, that it isn't so much the bomb itself as the passage of time since the bomb. Though our weapons have gotten more destructive, so has our resilience. For all its millions dead, the world recovered from WWII far quicker than Europe did the Thirty Years' War, or than Athens and Sparta did the Peloponnesian, or any other drawn-out conflict I can think of. But for a few nail-biting decades, the powers that be realized they had to avoid war, or else. And, forced to try it, we've learned that we can avoid war, and that, really, even our enemies are happy to avoid it, too.
But then, we've already sworn off war forever and ever, sworn it off more than once. I think we're in another race toward a unified society against the fading of generational memory. Maybe this time we'll work it out; maybe the global economy and vastly improved communications, both between cultures and between individual statesmen, will give us that final boost to avoid political war. Maybe prosperity will spread widely enough to quell the disenfranchised and prevent economic war. Maybe. I think the smart money, though, is on a ghastly bloodletting in another fifty or one hundred years. Just a guess.