Every parent knows how foolish indiscriminate threatening can make you look. I mean it. But, say the armchair warriors, we said we would never apologize and then we did. This reversal was humiliating. It was nothing less than the full kowtow.
Some people have great difficulty keeping their eye on the ball.
There was only one substantive issue at stake in our latest dispute with China. China wanted to use the leverage of our plane and its crew to get some concession from us on the subject of our surveillance flights over the South China Sea.