With friends like China, who needs enemies?

The current standoff over our downed EP-3E Aries II electronic surveillance plane and its 24 crewmen requires that we seriously rethink the U.S. foreign policy stance toward China. While not quite our enemy, China should certainly not be considered our friend.

Perhaps the details of this matter are a bit fuzzy, but the overall picture remains indisputable. A Chinese F-8 fighter jet bumped into our lumbering propeller plane and crashed into the ocean. Our plane, with two engines gone, its wing damaged and its nosecone smashed, managed to make a miraculous emergency landing on the small Chinese island of Hainan. Now the 24 crewmen are being held hostage and our plane dismembered until we apologize for being knocked out of the sky by a reckless fighter jet pilot.

China, of course, disputes the events recounted above, even though its story is entirely illogical. It claims that its pilot was "escorting" our plane which was flying over China's exclusive economic zone when the EP-3E made a sudden sharp turn, hitting the fighter and causing it to plummet into the sea. Our plane then made an illegal and unauthorized landing on Chinese soil, thereby violating the country's sovereignty.

Of course what the Chinese won't tell you — or its own people for that matter — is that the fighter was piloted by a hotshot about whom the United States had complained before. He had a tendency to get so close to our plane that he would hold up written messages for our pilot. He also had a little game he liked to play: hide directly under our plane where he couldn't be seen, then zoom up in front.

They don't mention that while their exclusive economic zone extends 188 miles out to sea, ships are allowed to sail in it, and planes are allowed to fly above it; territorial waters only extend twelve miles out to sea.

They don't mention that the F-8 is a fighter, capable of speeds in excess of 800 mph, while the Aries is a propeller plane traveling at around 350 mph.

They don't mention that the only reason that the U.S. plane had to land on sovereign Chinese soil was because otherwise it would have crashed. If they begrudge us this emergency landing, perhaps the next time one of their commercial airliners is in trouble near the United States, air traffic control should tell it to land in China.

Now that they have our men and our plane, they have picked the most antagonistic approach possible short of executing our crewmen — which some Chinese are advocating. Given the fact that apologies are extremely meaningful in Asian societies, capitulation to their deluded demands would make the United States appear weak and damage future negotiations both with China and with other nations. If China can exact reparations for an action for which it is at fault, nations in the future will be emboldened to take advantage of the United States in similar ways, and our credibility will be severely damaged.

China has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not consider the United States a friend and has worked hard to undermine our national interests. It has stolen our nuclear secrets, pointed the majority of its intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States, threatened to invade Taiwan and sold weapons to rogue states. Even if these actions do not make China our enemy, it must give us pause before considering it our friend. In the coming century China will pose a strategic threat to the United States as it attempts to alter the international status quo and tilt the balance of power more in its favor. An augmentation of China's international political power necessarily means a decrease in the United States' world standing. The United States must attempt to hedge China by asserting and maintaining its national security principles without antagonizing China to the extent that it feels the only way to maintain and further its world status would be to engage in, from our perspective, increasingly risky behavior.

Let us profit from China economically but at the same time be perpetually wary. Dan Ostrow is a politics major from New York City. He can be reached at dtostrow@princeton.edu.