The American B-52 bombers that flew over the East China Sea on Tuesday made a mockery of Beijing’s newly declared “air defence identification zone”.
To the outside world China now looks weak and ineffectual, as it obviously cannot match its blustery rhetoric with an actual defence of the uninhabited, Japanese-administered islands it claims as its territory.
But viewed from Beijing and the longer-term perspective of its strategic planners, establishing the new zone is a masterstroke that will change the facts on the ground – or in this case the air – pretty quickly.
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