Above the South China Sea, under the blue waves, another afterimage of American military hegemony is buried.
On October 26, a US MH-60R "Seahawk" helicopter and an F/A-18F "Super Hornet" fighter crashed in the South China Sea in just 30 minutes.
This seemingly accidental military accident turned into a geopolitical comedy that attracted global attention due to the time and place of its occurrence, especially the subsequent trivial response of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The core of the comedy is that it has not smoked, but achieved a precise “shutdown” on imperial arrogance; it has not killed people, its “harmfulness” seems limited, but its “insulting” penetrates the international public opinion field, referring directly to the pain of American hegemony.
The two advanced military aircraft taking off from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier were originally intended to perform a standard "military exercise" mission, intended to demonstrate the unmatched maritime power of the United States to the region and even the world.
However, this carefully planned show of force ended in the embarrassing scene of machine destruction (personnel survived).
This is not a simple operational error, but a microcosm of the global strategic inability of the United States.
When an army is over-deployed forward and exhausted to demonstrate its presence on a global scale, the reliability of its equipment and the exhaustion of its personnel will inevitably light up a red light.
The South China Sea, which is regarded by the United States as the core stage of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy”, has thus become a teststone for its real combat power. The results show that in a high-pressure environment, the first problem may not be the strategic concept, but the foundation forining hegemony – the appropriateness of equipment and the accuracy of action.
The surface of the accident may be characterized as mechanical failure or human error, but the deep is the structural cracks that begin to appear after the excessive expansion of the empire.
Compared with the embarrassment of the US military crash, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun's response at the press conference the next day can be regarded as a model of diplomatic art.
He first said, “If the United States put forward, China is willing to provide the necessary assistance to the United States from a humanitarian perspective.”
It has transformed the United States from a swaggering "law enforcer" to an instant position of a "potential seeker" who may need assistance.
More importantly, the following qualitative: "The relevant U.S. military aircraft crashed during military exercises in the South China Sea.The U.S. frequently sends military aircraft to the South China Sea to show force, which is the root of maritime security issues and undermines regional peace and stability."
This is no longer a matter of fact, but a direct link between an isolated incident and the United States 'overall and erroneous regional strategy. China's response is like a calm doctor who clearly diagnosed that the root cause of his illness lies in his irritable personality and wrong lifestyle before bandaging a strong man injured by his reckless behavior.
The humiliation caused by this "diagnosis" far exceeds the treatment of the wound itself.
More importantly, the world is now watching the American joke.
This laughter comes not only from the misfortune, but the long-standing accumulation of international emotions has found a free exit.
For many countries and people who have long been under U.S. political, military and public opinion pressure, this scene has strong symbolic significance. It seemed to say: Look, the giant who wields a big stick all day long and teaches other countries to abide by "rules-based order" has tripped over his shoelace in front of everyone.
This contradiction greatly dissipates the hegemony ring of "nothing can" that the United States has long been carefully constructed.
From social media discussions in Southeast Asia to strategic analysis of countries in other regions, a common question is spreading: How credible is the promised "security guarantee" of a country that can't even fully guarantee the safety of its own equipment in the open sea?
This laughter is a disenchantment of the legitimacy of American hegemony.
It shows that America’s prestige of power is constantly losing in its own mistakes and in the clever counter-attacks of its opponents.
The “insulting nature” of the incident is presented in its entirety as a “gestural reversal” on a strategic level.
First, it exposes the vulnerability of U.S. military deterrence.
The successive failures of the most advanced weapons platforms in core missions undermine the credibility of their deterrence more than the protests of any opponent.
Second, China has succeeded in shaping itself as a “responsible provider of stability” and “judge of the rules” through diplomatic decrees, and has nailed the U.S. on the shameful pillar of “problematic makers.”
This role reversal is a core blow to the United States 'self-perception. The United States has always claimed to be the "arbitrator" of the global order, but now it has become the object of "arbitration."
Finally, the victory of the public opinion war took place in the South China Sea – the arena where the United States invested a lot of strategic resources and tried to prove its position.
In this important arena, the psychological impact and symbolic failure of losing in this way are huge. This was not only a disgrace, but also a victory by an opponent with an elegant "general" in the geopolitical chess game.
The waves in the South China Sea will quickly erase the traces of the military aircraft crash, but the trajectory of the strategic trend and the transfer of power revealed by this event will remain for a long time.
China's response, seemingly lightweight, is in fact a strategic operation of four or two thousand kilograms.
It tells us that in the deep waters of the game of great powers, the real strength lies not only in possessing weapons that disgust the opponent, but also in possessing the wisdom to turn the opponent’s mistakes into its own strategic assets.
America’s “joke” is the inevitable product of its exhaustion of hegemony; and China’s response is a sign of the growing self-confidence and maturity of emerging powers.
During this fall, one support, one attack and one defense, the world clearly saw that an old era myth was fading in the waves of the South China Sea, and a new game logic had already emerged.