The China balloon incursion was actually quite serious – a Pentagon official calls it “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty” – but I couldn’t help laughing when the U.S. military informed us over the weekend that Chinese surveillance balloons “transited” the continental United States “at least three times during the prior administration.”
That revelation certainly popped the MAGA balloon. For days on end, the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later experts bellowed nonstop that if only their cult leader was still in office, (a) that spy thingy would’ve been blasted out of the sky in an instant, or (b) China, cowering at the thought of crossing the great man, would never have dared to float that balloon in the first place.
Oh well. As Homer Simpson always says, “D’oh!”
And what about those three Trump-era balloons? How come Trump officials never told us about them?How come they didn’t shoot them down? Did Trump know about them but insist that we be kept in the dark? Or did his subordinates keep him in the dark? Or did they mention the balloons in the intelligence reports that he often didn’t bother to read? (He said he didn’t read them because he didn’t need to; in his immortal words, “I’m, like, a smart person.”)
The truth is that China had no fear of Trump whatsoever. He had a Chinese bank account (as recently revealed in his long-suppressed tax returns). China’s top state-controlled bank also had a sweetheart deal with Trump – renting three floors in Trump Tower, a lucrative lease – while Trump was president. A Republican-leaning commentary website, The Bulwark, said in 2020 that Trump was “weak on China – economically, militarily, diplomatically.” Indeed, Trump sucked up to China dictator Xi Jinping, telling Republican donors: “President Xi, who is a strong man, I call him ‘king.’ He said, ‘But I am not king, I am president.’ I said, ‘No, you are president for life, and therefore you are king.’ He liked that. I call him ‘king.'”
Do most Americans know or remember those factoids? Not likely. MAGA loudmouths on cable and Twitter thrive on a low-information citizenry; that makes it easier for them to declare that Trump would’ve shot down last week’s balloon long before President Biden’s order was carried out by the Air Force. The MAGAts have no way of knowing that, of course, but that’s the beauty of being out of power; they can pump whatever nonsense they want into credulous minds.
(Wait til they find out that more than 260 Chinese spy satellites orbit the earth and watch us every day. Who’s gonna tell them?)
And rest assured that if an F-22 had blasted the balloon over Montana, raining down debris that may have killed some God-fearing gun-toting real Americans, the same MAGAts would be calling Biden a reckless murderer who warrants impeachment. I prefer the explanation offered yesterday on ABC News by retired Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “It’s very clear to me that the intelligence value of this (balloon), from the standpoint of what it was getting, was not worth the risk of killing an American on the ground.”
Meanwhile, intelligence experts (real ones, not instant ones on social media) are sharing what they feel it’s safe to share: that the U.S. jammed much of what the balloon was doing, so that China saw nothing particularly new; and that the “intelligence-collection pod” fell into the shallow Atlantic waters “largely intact,” which means “it should provide a useful opportunity to examine and reverse-engineer Chinese intelligence and communication systems.”
Granted, the balloon incident is further proof that American-Chinese tensions are acute, but we’re fortunate these days that a mature foreign policy-seasoned team is in power. This is no time for bellicose ignorance. It never is.