Yesterday, the Pentagon revealed that a Chinese surveillance balloon has lingered above the U.S. for days, including over a nuclear-missile silo site in Montana. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has indefinitely “postponed” his planned trip to China over the situation — but the administration should go further and pull back from the broader diplomatic thaw that it’s pursuing.
By all indications, this balloon is not by itself an unprecedented threat, and the Pentagon says that its intelligence-collection abilities aren’t any better than other means at China’s disposal. But there are a few particularly disturbing aspects that stand out. The balloon spent some amount of time over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which houses America’s 341st Missile Wing — and oversees over 100 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Chinese have claimed that the balloon was released accidentally and that it is a civilian meteorological device. They have expressed their “regret.” But U.S. officials aren’t buying it. And the balloon, apparently, can change direction: It was last spotted above Kansas at some 50,000 feet in the air.
This is not the first such aerial device to have been spotted by the U.S. military, a senior defense official told reporters yesterday. “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration,” the official said, without elaborating further. The Drive’s War Zone, a defense-focused blog, has catalogued similar incidents, including the February 2022 sighting of a balloon off the Hawaiian coast, near a secretive missile-test site. There could be links to unidentified aerial phenomena — UFOs — that are understood to be Chinese drone swarms, the War Zone also found.
Over the coming days and weeks, top military brass and the White House will face questions about their initial handling of the balloon. The Pentagon went public with it while it floated over Montana yesterday, but U.S. officials had tracked it since it first entered the U.S. via the Aleutian Islands. President Biden, the Wall Street Journal reported, wanted to shoot it down; defense officials advised against it citing the high risk to human life and property — apparently, while it was over Montana. It’s only been a day since the balloon’s presence has been revealed, but defense officials should be more forthcoming. They will certainly be pressed to say more by Congress.
For now, the balloon is continuing to drift eastward, and as it does, shooting it down will presumably get less palatable.
For now, only one thing is clear: It should not have taken a Chinese military-surveillance gambit linked to nuclear-missile silos in Montana to dissuade Blinken from going to China. Throughout last fall, the Biden administration, like much of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, has been convinced that the Chinese Communist Party is more willing to entertain good-faith discussions about a range of issues, including climate, North Korea, drug trafficking, and more. Yet that was never the case, even while President Biden sat down with General Secretary Xi in Bali, and it would not have been the case next week during Blinken’s scheduled meetings with Chinese officials.
Blinken gave the CCP’s top foreign-affairs official, Wang Yi, a dressing down this morning, according to the State Department’s summary of their call. And he repeatedly called the balloon’s presence a violation of American sovereignty during a press conference today. But the Chinese government-run police station that had operated in New York City until recently represents just as egregious a disregard for U.S. sovereignty; so do the ongoing harassment and stalking plots orchestrated across the U.S. by China’s ministry of state security. Before even considering a more cooperative relationship with China, first resolve the balloon issue — and other blatant instances of Chinese Communist Party interference in American life.