You know what has millions of people and is entirely unlike an individual human being? A country.
The convenient narratives spun to explain international politics seem entirely lost on people and are being treated as literal relations of how countries behave rather then shorthand.
"China" doesn't act like a person. It doesn't have emotions, moods or opinions like a person does. When we talk about "China thinks this" or "China feels that" we are not describing the moods of a human being, we're not even describing necessarily the aggregate mood of it's government except in so far as we're using a shorthand because we want to talk about trends in policy making or the types of people being appointed as advisers/policy-makers on whichever issue we are actually talking about specifically.
Countries and the people who make them up also form alliances, hate betrayal, and hold grudges. If your country thinks it is acceptable to betray allies, you will soon have no allies. If you say one thing and do another and the gap is wide enough, eventually no other country will believe a word you say, even when you tell the truth.
Alliances between countries are not formed in a rational way just on a specific issue normally, but based on previous actions and previous issues, and old loyalties. To betray those loyalties just means no-one will feel any loyalty to you - that may work in the short-term if you are big enough but long-term it's a terrible strategy.
So in that sense countries are like people, though I agree in many senses they are not.
Alliances are not formed on a specific issue, which is also why they're not broken on intangible issues. This is theatre by Merkel because it plays well with her public. I don't imagine US diplomats are losing any sleep over this.
The convenient narratives spun to explain international politics seem entirely lost on people and are being treated as literal relations of how countries behave rather then shorthand.
"China" doesn't act like a person. It doesn't have emotions, moods or opinions like a person does. When we talk about "China thinks this" or "China feels that" we are not describing the moods of a human being, we're not even describing necessarily the aggregate mood of it's government except in so far as we're using a shorthand because we want to talk about trends in policy making or the types of people being appointed as advisers/policy-makers on whichever issue we are actually talking about specifically.