While our political elite descends into fevered squabbling about who did what to which newspaper and vice versa, the United States and China are slugging it out in a battle for psychological (and military and commercial) dominance in the Pacific and South China Sea.

Knowing next to nothing about that part of the world, I defer to people like Walter Russell Mead who gives every impression of (a) understanding the underlying dynamics and (b) following a lot of detail. Plus he is no great Obama fan, so when he gives the Obama administration credit for doing a tough job well, it’s worth thinking about what’s happening.

The key theme in this energetic and interesting piece is that precisely because China is getting stronger, many smaller states in the region have an interest in cosying up to the USA in one way or the other:

Last fall, the Obama administration pulled off a diplomatic revolution in maritime Asia — the coastal and trading states on and around the Asian mainland that stretch in an arc from Korea and Japan, down to Australia and Indonesia, and sweep around through southeast Asia to India and Sri Lanka. Via Meadia has been following this story closely; it is the biggest geopolitical event since 9/11 and, while it builds on a set of US policies that go back at least as far as the Clinton administration and were further developed in the Bush years, the administration’s mix of policies represent a decisive turning point in 21st century Asian history.

The legacy press, still befuddled from drinking too much of the ‘US in decline’ Koolaid so widely peddled in recent years, has still not grasped just how audacious, risky and above all successful the new strategy is: the United States is building a Pacific entente to counter — though not to contain — the consequences of China’s economic growth and military posture in the region.

The US is lending its unequivocal support to the smaller Asian states who have boundary disputes with China in the resource-rich, strategically vital South China Sea. It has announced new deployments of troops and new military agreements as it extends its military network from northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, the Pacific islands) south and east to Australia, Singapore and beyond. It continues to deepen its strategic relation with India — Asia’s other nuclear superpower with a billion plus citizens and a country which openly states that the purpose of its (growing) nuclear arsenal is to balance China.

All of which makes the dramatic escape of Chen Guangcheng in the general direction of the US Embassy in Beijing so extraordinary:

Chen’s flight to the embassy will further deepen the angry paranoia in some circles; it will seem obvious to some that he could not have made this escape without more help than a handful of dissidents could provide, and the timing is so spectacular that it must be part of some secret, long prepared American scheme.

Put these ‘facts’ together with the new American assertiveness in the region, and many serious people in China will draw the conclusion that the US is trying to do to China what it did to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, they will think we are perilously close to success — so close, that any further concessions and retreats must be resisted as a matter of life and death.

Read the whole thing. Imposingly smart in looking at immediate diplomacy and Big Picture considerations alike.

My conclusion? Mr Chen will be becalmed in US diplomatic protection for some good time to come.