The Only Balloon Popped This Week Was the One of Credibility
The Chinese weather-ship-spy-balloon is gone by now, shot down yesterday once it had blown off the very cold East Coast. Its silent trek over the United States clearly has left significant tracks in the hot-air atmosphere on the ground.
In the end, this Chinese misadventure likely did not collect any valuable espionage, and though it was a test, it’s mixed messages likely worsened China-U.S. diplomacy efforts with China last night saying Americans were the ones doing wrong.
Yet, clearly the incident did unleash a load of venting that reflects more about our own national debates than international concerns, and the incident stirred up a lot of public nonsense about how we react in a time of perceived danger.
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With military assurances that there was little public danger, fortunately, we also got a lot of humor at the expense of politicians working like crazy to find an ideological cloud on which to stand and bay at the skies.
We got to see the New York Post and other right-leaning publications abandon the news to become foreign policy brokers, demanding that Joe Biden “pop the balloon” and we got grave institutional advice from intoning commenters about the dangers of encouraging other rogue nations to send balloons our way.
Americans got to rub embarrassed Chinese diplomatic faces in the obvious hypocrisy of claiming that this errant spy effort was a weather tracker blown off-course – even though a second balloon was spotted gliding across Central America. “Two balloons being coincidentally off course in two different places certainly seems to deflate that theory,” adroitly commented one expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
We got to see that the Pentagon has some care in its responses and held back from immediately shooting down the balloon because it was an unlikely threat and because that would mean China would start knocking our own espionage craft out of the sky. China was told the U.S. would destroy the floating spy platform.
And, naturally, we had Donald Trump weighing in that were he to be president, there would be no Chinese espionage, because, well, he’s against it.
A Bad Plot
In all, it seemed a sorry spy movie plot involving slow-moving cameras and lacking even in a traditional ornate Chinese red design.
China had little to gain from the effort of sending a balloon big enough to carry a metal substructure described as larger than three city buses. They already train satellites on our military installations. So, you wonder what the point was.
Politico noted that in forcing the cancellation of a diplomatic visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the balloon incident may actually have resulted in more leverage in the continuing talks about the future between U.S. and China. “Blinken was going to China without much hope of getting concessions on major issues such as Beijing’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine, its human rights abuses or its threats to Taiwan,” Politico reports. All those goals may be temporarily eased by international embarrassment over getting caught with a stupid spy trick.
Apparently China may dispute the experts’ current views that were summarized by one comment: “It puts pressure on China to do something as a goodwill gesture in response to what they’ve done.”
It took only one capture of a U2 surveillance overflight of Russia to significantly deepen the Cold War divides in the 1960s, and the return of pilot Francis Gary Powers went on for months before a spy swap was negotiated.
One of the many Twitter wags who decided this was a moment for ridicule suggested that Blinken show up at the Beijing airport carrying an armload of Mylar balloons – certainly an indication that within even a day, the incident had gone from Armageddon to Saturday Night Live.
The Political Response
The incident allowed the usual scramble among Republicans to talk tough about China and for Democrats to sound as if they cared whether debris from shooting down an unarmed, drifting big balloon for little gain might harm civilians below.
Serious voices admonished Chinese spying efforts, as if we are not doing exactly the same thing in reverse.
Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a briefing that this balloon had some ability to maneuver itself, and noted that similar efforts have “happened a handful of other times over the past few years.” The balloon was spotted first over Montana, which means it had already been drifting over Washington and Idaho and then followed wind routes across Colorado, Missouri and towards the Carolina coast.
No one has explained what it could see, just that as a balloon, it is easier to evade radar sensors.
Clearly balloons are cheaper and easier to operate than satellites or drones, though you don’t hear folks in Ukraine asking for more balloons to help in any live war role.
The use of spy balloons reportedly dates to as early as the 1700s during the French Revolution and has played a role in military and intelligence operations, various publications noted. The New York Times reported that the Union and Confederate armies used balloons for military surveillance during the Civil War. Japan also sent 9,000 military balloons with bombs attached to the United States during World War II, but only six people in the U.S. were killed when they came in contact with one in May 1945, according to the Times.
And both NASA and the National Weather Service actually do use balloons for observing parts of Earth.
The only balloon popped this week was the one of credibility.
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