My Take | Much ado about a big white balloon
- The relationship between the superpowers is so bad and expectations so low about the Antony Blinken visit that the two sides decided to have a tit-for-tat diplomatic farce instead of substantive talk
A gigantic balloon drifting slowly and aimlessly overhead was supposed to be a Chinese intelligence-gathering device, at least on the telling of the American government. But to paraphrase the flatulent and horrible MI5 veteran Jackson Lamb from Mick Herron’s cynically funny Slough House series, “I thought spying was supposed to be stealthy.”
So Washington did what it does best – shot it down. In a typically American overkill, an F-22 fighter jet was deployed off the South Carolina coast to fire an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, which reportedly costs between US$381,000 and US$600,000 apiece. Couldn’t they have just machine-gunned the balloon? American taxpayers now know why their military needs funding of more than US$1 trillion a year.
Whether the balloon was used for spying, according to the Americans, or weather research, as the Chinese side has claimed, is immaterial. It’s probably wise to take any public statement or criticism from either side with a grain of salt and assume we will likely never know what really happened. The real point, though, is that relations between the two countries are so bad that neither side had much expectation about the visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now postponed without a rescheduled date. Instead, they preferred a farcical diplomatic tit-for-tat.
“The US’ use of force is a clear overreaction,” said a statement by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Quite; after all, it was a missile for a balloon.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, that at least this time around, it was the Chinese who stirred the pot to have some fun. Since Donald Trump was president, every high-level meeting has been prefaced or followed by more in-your-face sanctions against, or blacklisting of, Chinese officials and companies. You can hardly blame Beijing for having a cynical view about such “high-level” rituals that have become glorified photo-ops.
Let’s put this balloon farce in context. Consider the levels and frequency of deliberate US provocations since Blinken’s trip was first disclosed in December.
At about the same time as the announcement was made while tensions mounted over Taiwan, the USS Chancellorsville sailed into the South China Sea to “exercise the freedom of navigation”, which is the diplomatic and military equivalent of “mooning” other drivers from your car on a highway.
