M.S. at the Economist questions China's self-defeating muscle-flexing:
The basic lesson here is that large countries gain influence and power when they adhere to rule-based international systems that give smaller countries a fair shake. They lose influence and power when they act aggressively and unpredictably to extend their own interests at the expense of smaller countries. However, large countries are often swept by tremendous waves of internal nationalism, since their citizens tend not to encounter foreign citizens or media very often, rarely speak foreign languages, and aren't used to the idea that their large and powerful countries may be constrained by anybody else's views or interests. Inside the political systems of large countries, there are usually internal incentives to feed overweening patriotism and nationalism, and to win political battles by accusing rivals of having betrayed the country by being insufficiently aggressive against foreigners. That leads politicians to take aggressive foreign-policy positions which then harm the country's actual interests by provoking fear and antipathy abroad, and generating a counter-reaction. This, at least, is how I can make sense of otherwise inexplicable and self-destructive moves like China's statement that the South China Sea is a "core interest" (the term it also uses for Tibet and Taiwan), possibly committing itself to a negotiating position it can't win and can't back down from. The United States has committed some similarly inept unforced errors over the past decade. But more recently, America has toned down the unilateral nationalism and toned up the rule-based multilateralism. It works.
I think there's one very important difference here: the U.S. wrote most of the rules. China did not.
