Inflating the threat balloon

XULIO RIOS

Will it be a spy balloon or not? Maybe with time it will be known. China says it entered US airspace accidentally and due to force majeure, which is for civil and scientific purposes. The Pentagon acknowledged that it did not pose a significant risk in terms of intelligence, but denied the major one.

Referring to spies, Sun Zi says in The Art of War that the greatest treasure of this stratagem lies in the fact that the enemy kingdom is not aware of these activities, which, in this case, is obviously not the case, in a way that is even shameful. The Chinese have insisted that he was not a spy and that they evidently have more sophisticated means for these missions. Be that as it may, the shooting down of the balloon paves the way for a similar response on their part to a similar case.

Few will remember the 2001 incident when China detected an American spy plane and forced it to land on Hainan Island. A Chinese pilot was killed in the incident. The American crew was arrested and the spy plane was dismantled piece by piece. Everything returned to normal after what is known as the “double apology letter” that the American ambassador in Beijing had to deliver to the then foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan.

Circumstances are different now and the severity is much less. Above all, the context is what really matters. There are those in Washington who earn more from this incident than from holding Secretary of State Antony Blinken's planned visit to Beijing. Since Joe Biden and Xi Jinping gave the go-ahead for the diplomatic summit in China that was to take place last weekend in Bali in November, expectations of a moderately satisfactory balance sheet have been lowered day by day. And although the visit has only been suspended, it is not clear that it will take place soon. And not so much because of how tangled bilateral relations are in general at the moment, but because of the new crisis that is looming with the probable visit in a few weeks of Nancy Pelosi's successor in the presidency of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, to the island of Taiwan. If it happens, it could be delayed for months or even not be held until the previous APEC summit, to be held in November of this year in San Francisco.

China has given signs that it wants to calm things down. The balloon should not be there. They knew it could be easily detected. It is shooting itself in the foot. The incident reinforces the opposite trend, a narrative that emphasizes China's threatening condition, an extreme that many still have doubts about, even though they recognize that it resists emulating the Western project in all its extremes. But the affair will encourage the discourse of those in the US who are betting on one twist after another against China to avoid being surpassed. And at any price. Even if this means splitting the world economy in two, as they are already doing with the argument of security and the "affinity of values" in the face of a China that leads an "authoritarian retreat" against the famous international order based on (our) rules.

The balloon over US airspace compromises China if their explanations don't match. The United States hopes to prove that he is lying. Although everyone knows that the US is the great champion of espionage, all of this furthers this view of the threat and should give more cause for concern about Chinese military might and hypothetical claims etc., thus justifying the ambitious US military program and NATO in the Indo-Pacific.

This pretext for continuing to put together a security architecture to contain China in the world would also justify the ongoing technological war, which points to a calculated plan of industrial disconnection from China to which the US is trying to add allies, even using open pressure. such as those recently applied to countries such as the Netherlands or Japan. The balloon incident will serve to raise -and never better said- this bet.

What is not a balloon in the metaphorical sense is the desire, with more or less reason, to incite confrontation, with the military dimension becoming increasingly important, as would be demonstrated by the tightening of security partnerships around China and the pressure on the respective capitals to opt for one or the other. There is the US access to four new military bases in the Philippines “to respond more quickly to humanitarian disasters and climatic catastrophes”… The predictable tightening of the situation in the Taiwan Strait in the coming months will also serve this purpose, scaring with the growing probability of conflict.

Xulio Ríos is an emeritus advisor to the China Policy Observatory.