State Department expects no ‘new policy’ from Biden spy balloon response
Joel Gehrke
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President Joe Biden’s call for the negotiation of “global norms” for balloons in sovereign airspace is unlikely to lead to “new policy,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team.
“I don’t believe it’s intended to be for the discovery of new policy or anything like that,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters Thursday.
Biden seemed to portray the talks as a key step in his response to the downing of one Chinese balloon and four other unidentified objects in North American airspace in recent weeks.
“We’ll update the rules and regulations for launching and maintaining unmanned objects in the skies above the United States of America,” Biden said. “My secretary of state will lead an effort to help establish common global norms in this largely unregulated space.”
BIDEN SAYS NO EVIDENCE OF ‘SUDDEN INCREASE’ OF AERIAL OBJECTS IN US AIRSPACE
The president addressed the public following weeks of domestic shock and international disputes over China’s alleged spy balloon program. The controversy erupted after an offending balloon was photographed by a journalist in Montana on Feb. 1, resulting in a spectacle that ended with the downing of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina. That incident was followed soon after by the detection of three other objects operating at lower altitudes in range of civilian air traffic.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were,” Biden said. “But nothing right now suggests they’re related to China’s spy balloon program, or there were surveillance vehicles from any other country. The intelligence committee’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”
The question of regulations around high-altitude activity has bedeviled negotiators for decades. A landmark Cold War-era treaty stipulated that “outer space … not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but it did not define the boundary of outer space.
“Therefore, a contradiction emerges: outer space constitutes the vertical frontier of national territories which, although finite, extend themselves from the surface of the Earth up to an undetermined altitude,” as the United Nations committee on peaceful uses of outer space put it in 2018.
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Blinken remains “eager” to pursue the talks that Biden mentioned. “I know the secretary is looking forward to … working with his counterparts to help develop and work on some of these standards as it relates to maneuverable and nonmaneuverable objects, whether they be balloons or otherwise,” Patel said.