AIIB: Washington loses campaign against Beijing

'WHAT was he thinking?' is the kind of rhetorical question we would direct at, for example, the lazy high-school student who ended up plagiarising the historical narrative posted on the website of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and submitted it as a class paper on race relations in America. It was a silly idea that didn't make a lot of sense, and it wasn't going to work.

Which is unfortunately the kind of question we need to ask US policymakers who appeared not to make a lot of sense on many levels when they decided to launch a major diplomatic campaign against China's proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Remember how American officials and lawmakers were delivering those sermons to the Chinese a few years ago, arguing that as China was emerging as a leading geostrategic and geo- economic power, it needed to take a more activist role as a "stakeholder" in world affairs? In particular, the Americans were complaining that as it was becoming one of the world's two largest economies, China …