Trial Balloon
Four days ago, the local television station in Montana showed video of a white balloon floating eastward at about 60,000 feet of altitude. It had been spotted near the Aleutian Islands on January 28 by the U.S. military, but wasn’t reported on the news until a little after 4 p.m. on February 1 near Reed Point, Mont. By Saturday morning it was soaring high over my niece’s house in Asheville, N.C. Around 2 p.m. it was shot down by an American fighter plane just off the coast of South Carolina.
It was clear early on this was a Chinese balloon. They’re not uncommon: The United States launches weather balloons all the time. I once saw one floating high over Phoenix around 7 a.m. as I was returning from a visit to Texas. Their speed and direction of travel are determined by the winds aloft, sometimes the winds of the jet stream, which often follows the same path taken by our white visitor.
This balloon wasn’t a stealth balloon. It wasn’t a secret; anyone could see it. The notion it was being used for spying on military installations, of which there are many along the balloon’s path, is preposterous. For one thing, not only does China have satellites in the polar orbits characteristic of spy satellites; they have a space station that, like the ISS, travels from west to east. You can see it most clear nights (https:// www.astroviewer.net/iss/en/observation-css.php).
By traveling from north to south rather than from west to east (except for Israeli satellites, which orbit east to west), spy satellites pass within camera range of every location on earth at least once a day, depending on their altitude. Quora.com has a web page that explains the mechanics (https://www.quora.com/ How-often-does-a-spy-satellite-in-a-polar-orbit-passover-the-same-spot-on-the-earth-or-close-enough-tophotograph-the-same-spot). Point is, they don’t gain anything by sending a balloon to spy on us. And we can shoot a balloon down, as we did last Saturday afternoon. There was no urgency, so they waited to drop it in the waves just off the South Carolina coast. It wasn’t transmitting back the GPS coordinates of our ICBM silos. Even I know where they’re located.
And by the way, three similar Chinese balloons passed over the United States during Trump’s presidency as well, and no one became alarmed. It was assumed they were weather balloons. But the Republican Party won’t miss an opportunity to be critical, no matter how ridiculous it makes them look. So Senator Tom Cotton now saying that Biden should have shot the balloon down when it was over the Aleutian Islands. Never mind the fact that it was almost certainly a weather balloon. It’s just a game they play. If Biden does A, he should have done B, and if he does B, he should have done A. Sometimes, to my chagrin, Democrats employ the same tactic. They shouldn’t. It’s a cheap shot employed by little men. Democrats can do better; they don’t have to go low.
Does the United States have the right to shoot down a foreign adversary’s balloon as it passes over our territory? Does a large hirsute carnivore relieve itself in the forest? Damn straight it does. Territorial sovereignty is a well-established principle in international relations. It doesn’t matter what the balloon was doing. So China’s protests notwithstanding, they were asking for it. The debris of the balloon fell into shallow water, and should be recovered shortly. We’ll all soon know if it was used for military surveillance or for predicting storms in the Pacific.
Last month, as one of its first orders of business as the majority party in the House, Republicans approved a select subcommittee “on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” in a party-line vote. For the next two years, most of the work of the House of Representatives will consist of anything and everything that can damage President Biden, in the hope of deluding millions of low-information (read “ignorant”) voters into voting him out in 2024. If nothing material arises, they’ll make mountains out of molehills, because that’s what they do.
The real story is the Republican Party is desperate to make a federal case out of what’s almost certainly a nothing burger. Anyway, we’ll all know what it was in a few days. In the meantime, the headlines are full of Balloongate. After that, it will be all Hunter Biden, all the time — until another nothing burger pops up, ready for the same histrionic treatment.