What the Spy Balloon Reveals About U.S.-China Relations
When U.S. aircraft shot down a high-altitude Chinese balloon last Saturday off the coast of South Carolina, they recovered a potential intelligence haul. It seems that China has been experimenting with a surveillance balloon network for several years, including brief intrusions into foreign airspace, including that of Taiwan and the United States.
China maintains that the balloon was a meteorological device that went off course—a dubious claim, given the size of the vessel. However, it’s still likely that the balloon’s course was a mistake, not a deliberate provocation. It’s hard to see what China would gain from the move, especially given the ongoing attempt to rebuild U.S.-China relations, however fragile. (One could imagine a scenario in which a hawkish faction in Beijing may have sought to sabotage U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s now-postponed diplomatic trip to China, though.)
Furthermore, past incursions into foreign airspace by Chinese balloons have been relatively short, not an eight-day jaunt visible to thousands of people on the ground that ended with the United States taking possession of the balloon’s payload. The extreme cold weather in north Asia late last month could have disrupted the balloon’s course. It’s also possible that Beijing simply lost control of the vessel.
None of this stopped a “hullaballoon” from breaking out among U.S. pundits over the incident. Some media coverage even raised the possibility of a “balloon gap,” but that assumes there must be a cunning motivation behind the surveillance. Because the Chinese military is particularly opaque, its mistakes are less obvious. But corruption pervades the military procurement system. The surveillance balloon may be a useful, cost-efficient tool; it may also be an expensive boondoggle.
Pundits and politicians in Washington tend to read Beijing’s actions as a test of will. From this perspective, anything China does probes the boundaries of the U.S. willingness to react; any reaction but the most extreme will convince U.S. opponents that it’s weak. Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, blamed the Biden administration for not destroying the balloon sooner. This attitude transforms every minor provocation into a high-stakes conflict. As a result, the U.S. military’s sensible approach—to wait to shoot down the balloon since its surveillance threat had been neutralized—is seen as a sign of weakness.
This reaction follows another tendency among U.S. politicians: to use concerns about China as a weapon in domestic partisan fights. Much of the commentary about the surveillance balloon, especially from the U.S. right wing, was detached from reality. Republican politicians speculated that the balloon contained “bioweapons” and that U.S. President Joe Biden was “compromised” by China. Some Republican lawmakers posted images with guns promising to shoot down the balloon themselves.
All of this was, of course, counterproductive to sane policymaking. But it reflects something that happened throughout the Cold War, from Red Scares to the fear that UFOs were a secret Soviet military project. Then—as now—the panic was worsened by a lack of transparency, leading the United States to be convinced of an imaginary “missile gap.” Of course the Soviet threat was real, but paranoias did damage to U.S. policy at home and abroad.
Mutual surveillance is a reality that requires a measured reaction. The United States uses a variety of tools, from satellites to intercepted communications, to surveil China. It’s not unreasonable that China would attempt to do the same to the United States. That doesn’t make airspace violations acceptable. They pose a real risk: of being mistaken for something more dangerous. During the Cold War, serious tragedies resulted from such mistakes, even as world-ending possibilities were narrowly averted.
Yet the same tendency toward paranoia is even stronger within the Chinese government, which often suspects foreign meddling where there is none. The surveillance balloon crisis, as minor as it is, hasn’t been helped by China’s complaints over the U.S. shootdown or its refusal to take top-level calls from the Pentagon. Blinken’s trip will likely still go ahead in the coming months, but the incident serves as a reminder of just how fragile relations remain.
Meanwhile, in other news, China has trained squirrels to sniff out drugs. We must ask ourselves: What else could the squirrels be trained to do? Can the United States afford a “squirrel gap”?