APB: The Balloon is Up

            During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. Thus the expression, “the balloon is up.” In recent times, a number of countries, including the US and France, have launched data-gathering balloons. The Chinese military last year reported favorably on many uses for such balloons, including for surveillance, communication, weather information, and communication. The detection of a Chinese balloon hovering over Montana, where the US houses ICBMs, probably falls into the category of military surveillance, though the fact of the matter remains to be determined.

            To my mind, the US has overreacted to the discovery, postponing an important visit to Beijing by the secretary of state. Granted, a Chinese high-altitude balloon should not have been floating over US territory; as Secretary Blinken said, it violated sovereignty and international law. Still, there are mitigating circumstances, to wit:

• This is not the first time Chinese balloons have appeared in US skies, without incident;
• The US routinely deploys spy planes and satellites over Chinese territory;
• The data presumably collected by the Chinese balloon may not be all that sensitive; China has far more sophisticated ways of acquiring military intelligence.
• The incident draws attention away from recent provocative actions by the US and its Pacific allies, including increases in US forces in Guam and Okinawa, agreement with the Philippines to expand the US base network there, and Japan’s new strategic plan (see Post #362)–all focused on the China threat.

Even assuming the worst—that the Chinese balloon was for intelligence gathering and not (as Beijing claims) for weather reporting—the incident could and should have been treated as a diplomatic episode. We should recall other serious US-China encounters, such as the US shooting down of a Chinese jet over Hainan island, and the US bombing of a target in Serbia that turned out to be the Chinese embassy. Both those incidents resulted in loss of life by the Chinese, and consequent US apologies.

In all these incidents, the common thread is diplomacy. The job of diplomats is to reach an understanding that bad conduct will not be repeated, and that an incident is not an act of war. If US-China relations were positive today, the tension of the latest incident would not have stopped Blinken from going to Beijing. What the Chinese should have done was taken responsibility for the overflight of US territory and welcomed Blinken to discuss the matter. That should have been sufficient to justify the trip, whose purpose was to reduce tensions and promote mutual understanding. The incident was a lost opportunity to improve relations–lost, as some observers (and the Chinese) are now saying, because “Biden’s team worried that the incident would serve as more fodder for Republicans who believed the administration is weak on China . . . ” (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-04/from-china-to-big-sky-the-balloon-that-unnerved-the-white-house). That’s precisely how minor incidents become international crises.