The Morning Call

How does US-China relationsh­ip continue after spy balloon saga?

- By Daniel DePetris Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

If you thought the Chinese spy balloon saga would deflate as fast as the balloon did over the Atlantic Ocean, you’re sadly mistaken. Days after an. F-22 destroyed the device with a single air-to-air missile at 58,000 feet, the story continues to hover over the news cycle like a blimp over Mile High Stadium. The only difference is we can’t use a fighter jet to bomb the conversati­on out of existence.

Take the emotion out of it, and the discovery of the spy balloon is a relatively mundane event. By the Pentagon’s own admission, this isn’t the first time Beijing has pulled something like this — and it’s not even the first time it has occurred over U.S. territory. Indeed, as members of Congress and pundits were running around with their hair on fire about the balloon blocking the sun, another one was spotted somewhere over Latin America. Such incursions aren’t ideal, of course, but they aren’t surprising either — and if U.S. defense officials can be taken at their word, they also aren’t very effective in scooping up informatio­n.

Nor is spying some new developmen­t in the world of statecraft. People have been spying on one another since the dawn of time; the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the British Empire, the Persian Empire, the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir

Putin, they all have done it. Even friends conduct espionage on one another; in 2013, France’s former chief of domestic intelligen­ce said Paris often practiced the dark arts against Washington.

The U.S., too, tries to get as much informatio­n as it can on its allies’ decision-making. The U.S. tapped the phones of three French presidents between 2006 and 2012, and the National Security Agency did the same thing to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which caused a significan­t diplomatic dust-up at the time.

The uproar over the balloon, it seems, is less about China trying to gather intelligen­ce than on the fact that the balloon was allowed to drift across U.S. territory for nearly a week before President Joe Biden ordered the Air Force to shoot the thing down. Mix in the typical partisansh­ip and the politics of looking tough on China, Washington’s most significan­t competitor in the world today, and the entire conversati­on becomes laughably juvenile. In the view of some lawmakers, China was attempting to peer into the private lives of the American people and the Biden administra­tion exposed itself as a weak miscreant hesitant to pull the trigger.

Back on planet Earth, the balloon was shot down over water. The amount of intelligen­ce the balloon captured was minuscule, perhaps even redundant to what Beijing already possesses. U.S. divers are in the Atlantic collecting the debris. And China’s Xi Jinping, who likes to project himself as a leader in total and full control, looks like a fool internatio­nally for his limp excuses about the device being a meteorolog­ical tool. If anything, the affair is as much a controvers­y for Xi as it is for Biden.

What’s done is done. The more important issue on the table is how the U.S. and China choose to go forward. Do they let a common instance of espionage derail attempts at establishi­ng guardrails over the world’s most important bilateral relationsh­ip? Or do both countries press ahead on the diplomatic initiative outlined by Biden and Xi during a bilateral summit last November, when the two committed to preventing U.S.-China relations from going deeper into the sewer?

The early indication­s are troubling. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit China this past Sunday, a trip that included a sit-down with Xi — the first time in nearly six years America’s top diplomat would set foot on Chinese soil. In the heat of the moment, however, Biden decided to cancel Blinken’s meeting after Washington discovered the Chinese spying device drifting over Alaska and Canada into Montana.

Beijing’s actions, Blinken told reporters Friday, “created the conditions that undermine the purpose of the trip, including ongoing efforts to build a floor under the relationsh­ip and to address a broad range of issues” that are of importance to the internatio­nal community. While Blinken left open the option of visiting China when conditions allow, he didn’t outline what those conditions would be.

Given the sensationa­lism surroundin­g #BalloonGat­e, the administra­tion likely felt it didn’t have a choice but to do something, beyond destroying the balloon, to register its disapprova­l of China’s actions. The political environmen­t in Washington being what it is — overwhelmi­ngly hawkish on China policy, with a sprinkling of reasonable voices that press for responsibl­e competitio­n mixed in — the White House would have suffered if it allowed Blinken to fly to Beijing. Postponing the trip was one of those simple moves that could be taken immediatel­y, and one whose diplomatic fallout would be minimal.

That’s the hope, at least. It’s also the best-case scenario, for the last thing Washington and Beijing need right now is a relationsh­ip in even deeper turmoil. We aren’t talking about two pipsqueak countries with next to no geopolitic­al significan­ce but rather two economic giants that make up around 42% of the world’s gross domestic product and more than half its military spending and have a booming trade relationsh­ip of their own.

These are two countries whose navies frequently traverse the same congested Asian waters, including but not limited to the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. And these are two countries that, systemic foreign policy and economic disputes notwithsta­nding, really don’t have a choice but to learn to live with each other.

 ?? U.S. NAVY ?? Sailors recover a high-altitude surveillan­ce balloon Sunday off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
U.S. NAVY Sailors recover a high-altitude surveillan­ce balloon Sunday off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

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