Trump Passed China's First Strategic Test

Salvatore Babones

Security, Asia

We shouldn’t let China return the drone as if the problem were all a misunderstanding.

It’s been an eventful few days for U.S.-China relations. On Thursday, Andrew S. Erickson presciently wrote in the National Interest that China would perform a “Trump Test” that “could involve China’s maritime militia harassing the operations of U.S. warships or surveillance ships.” On Friday the test came, when the Chinese navy plucked an unmanned surveying drone out of the water just as its mother ship was retrieving it. On Saturday, China said it would return the drone—eventually.

And on Sunday morning, Trump passed the test when he tweeted that China could keep the drone, on the house.

The Obama administration’s demand that China immediately return the drone misses the point. In fact, it plays to China’s assertion that this is a simple missing property case, that the Chinese navy merely found the drone in the water and picked it up as a potential hazard to navigation.

Allowing China to return the drone as if the problem were all a misunderstanding allows the Chinese government to save face—when in fact its navy is engaging in dangerously inappropriate conduct. That might be reasonable if the Chinese navy were a rogue force within the Chinese government. But the Chinese navy is only applying in action the government’s oft-stated policy that the entire South China Sea is in fact an internal Chinese lake.