Politics

So Far, So Good

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

April 3, 2001 / 5:43 PM EDT / CBS

The U.S. standoff with China over a Navy spy plane is President Bush's first foreign policy test — and so far, he's getting good marks.

Adjectives used by the analysts to rate Mr. Bush and his team's response to the situation up to this point include words such as "judicious" and "cautious."

"I think they've handled it extremely well," Thomas Christensen, a political science professor at MIT, told CBSNews.com.

Indeed, the president himself has neatly sidestepped questions that could in any way inflame the official rhetoric, caught up as it is over whether the Navy plane was flying over Chinese airspace and who bumped into whom. Mr. Bush has deftly darted around questions about whether the plane's crew could be viewed as "hostages," and whether the incident leading to the aircraft's emergency landing within China's borders was a provocation by Beijing meant to test Washington. After all, to the Chinese leaders, he's the new guy in town.

The Spy Plane Standoff

Jiang Demands U.S. Apology Ignoring President Bush's warning to return a U.S. spy plane and its crew or harm relations, President Jiang Zemin demanded an apology for the midair collision. Those Caught In The MiddleAs diplomats posture, the families and friends of the 24-member spy plane crew worry what will happen to their loved ones.Names Of The Crew

"They have not threatened consequences. They have made their concerns known with particular priority to the safety and well being and access to the crew," said Dr. Jonathan Pollock of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "The disposition of the aircraft is a separate matter. Although it's sensitive, it's clearly not as important at this point as ensuring the well-being and the very timely release of the crew."

What's murkier is how the Bush team's grasp of the short-term crisis, if successful, will steer the administration through the contentious, long-term waters of the U.S.-China relationship.

During last year's campaign for the White House, then-candidate Bush called China a "strategic competitor," a deliberate shift away from his predecessor' perception of Beijing as an eventual "strategic partner." In a few weeks, the president is to decide on U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which is viewed by China as its territory. And don't forget bipartisan concerns on Capitol Hill about China's human rights record, or Mr. Bush's desire to design and deploy a national missile defense which Beijing vehemently opposes.

Yet such distinctions between the Bush and Clinton administrations "are often overdrawn," said Christensen.

"I don't think this incident will fundamentally change U.S.-China relations, unless it's handled extremely badly in Beijing," he said.

Another thicket for the Bush team is the domestic political situation within China, where a leadership struggle for control of the Communist Party always seems to be in progress or just around the corner. On the one hand, China does a lot of trade with the United States. On the other, it must juggle that with the rollercoaster global economy, internal corruption and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

"There's a constituency in China that does not want the government to what the Chinese might call 'lose face.' That's very important in China. And for that reason, they won't back down. And secondly, I believe they won't back down, because there are actually pressures within the Communist Party probably to take a tough stand," said Tom DeLuca, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York who has studied in China.

However, there exists the potential — if it's not already in use — for "back channel" contacts between the Bush team and its Chinese counterparts to clear the air away from the spotlight.

An obvious example cited ad nauseum in America is former President Bush, who before his White House years headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing in the 1970s. But less prominent names abound under the radar, too. China's current ambassador to Washington knows the Bush family from back in the Beijing days, noted Pollock.

"I think that that is why the administration has been reluctant to air too much publicly for fear that it will, in effect, circumscribe its options and end up on an unproductive path," he said.

Back channels or not, a burdensome factor is that a number of the administration's senior appointments to conduct its Asia policy just aren't in place, because they haven't been confirmed.

"This is not the timetable that they would have wished for ... Whatever the talent, the experience, the knowledge, and know-how of the people at the top, we're not fully staffed." Pollock added.

While that doesn't seem to have impaired the White House's ability to handle the spy plane stand-off, the incident could undercut Mr. Bush's plans to chart his own course on overall U.S. policy toward China down the road.

"They don't have the luxury of time," said Pollock. "Events are driving this in a way that if they don't deawith it credibly, they will find their options, I think, actually quite circumscribed, and they might find pressure from other parts of the political process," such as Congress.