Biden’s balloon blunder
Washington Examiner
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Shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon now flying over America is more complicated than it seems. Because of the balloon’s altitude and attached arrays, a shoot-down order would risk debris spraying over a wide area, endangering people on the ground. Still, President Joe Biden’s lethargic response to this affront is disappointing at best.
His first failure is failing to condemn China for the incursion. The balloon is not, as Beijing ludicrously claims, a meteorological monitoring device. It is a spy platform designed to provide high-fidelity imagery of our country’s possessions. It may also have signals or sensor systems to collect communications or provide data for the future military targeting of U.S. missile bases. It seems not coincidental that the balloon has been hovering over land-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile silos. Because China can gather high-quality imagery from its spy satellites, this balloon is probably carrying sensors that a satellite lacks.
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The balloon is a threat to national security. But rather than identify that threat and condemn President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party for making it, Biden hasn’t even taken questions on the topic. He has not condemned it clearly. The U.S. response appears to be nothing more than an occasional update from the military and confused messaging from the State Department.
On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally announced he was delaying a trip to China. A State Department official explained that the United States had “noted the [People’s Republic of China’s] statement of regret, but the presence of this balloon in our airspace is a clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law.” Why equivocate? Why bother with China’s insincere regret? Why hasn’t U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns been recalled from Beijing for consultations? That would be an appropriate response to this outrage. A cursory summoning of a Chinese diplomat to the State Department doesn’t cut it.
Members of Congress are rightly demanding answers. The public is understandably concerned. Biden and his team by contrast seem to have fundamentally misread the room — or perhaps the sky.
This is a self-inflicted blunder. Through weakness, the Biden administration has undermined significant recent foreign policy successes it had achieved against China. These included a deal with Japan and the Netherlands to restrict high-tech chip exports to China, a deal with the Philippines to provide the U.S. military with access to bases needed in any war with China over Taiwan, and big boosts to Japan’s defense spending and posture.
Those successes suggested Biden might be serious about confronting the unique challenge Beijing poses to U.S. security and the democratic international order. Now the commander in chief hides as a Chinese spy balloon floats across sovereign American airspace.
There is a cost to this hesitation. It confirms Beijing’s belief that Biden is weak and hesitant. It undermines the confidence of U.S. allies and partners that, when the next crisis comes, Biden will be ready and able to act decisively.
There is a better course of action.
If the risks of downing the balloon over the U.S. landmass are real — we will learn in the coming days whether Biden had an opportunity to destroy it at low risk — why hasn’t Biden at least spoken out against China’s affront? Chinese fighter jets harass U.S. spy planes in international airspace, so why does the U.S. tolerate China’s sustained intelligence harassment in our airspace?
The U.S. may be preparing to destroy the balloon once it is over water. But that is little comfort. The public is shocked that our most powerful adversary is sauntering through U.S. airspace with impunity.
This president should remind himself of a former Democratic president‘s motto: “The buck stops here.”
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