What a Difference a Few Pixels Make

There’s an old wisecrack that with the aid of a computer you can make a mistake in a matter of a microsecond it would have taken years to make by hand. Apparently, that’s true about map-drawing in spades. Consider this article by Khang Vu at RealClearDefense:

On 9 September, the U.S. embassy in Hanoi published on Facebook a map of Vietnam on a poster to commemorate the 25th anniversary of U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic relations. At first the map did not attract much attention, given both countries had celebrated the occasion on 11 July, the official date of the anniversary. Yet several days later, a small number of Vietnamese netizens recognised that the map included the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea as a part of Vietnamese territory.

The inclusion appeared of major significance. The U.S. official position regarding these heavily contested islands has to date been one of neutrality. Instead of taking sides, Washington has declared it will use its influence “to discourage the use of military force or unilateral expansion of claims of sovereignty”. Yet including the islands in a map of Vietnam suggested the United States was not only now taking sides, but also backing Vietnam in a dispute with five other countries, including China, as well as the Philippines ­– a U.S. treaty ally.

or, in other words, the difference between relative peace and wellbeing and an international incident can be just a matter of a few pixels here and there. Read the whole thing.

It also illustrates a point I’ve made from time to time here: don’t discount how much policy is inadvertently being made by relatively low level employees simply because management doesn’t understand the implications of what they’re doing until it has already been done. That isn’t just true in government. I have never encountered an organization in which that was not the case.