5 Lingering Questions About China’s Spy Balloon
Baffling response raises questions perhaps more troubling, and revealing, than whatever information the balloon might have beamed back to China and Beijing might have gleaned about our defenses
5 Lingering Questions About China’s Spy Balloon
China neither fears nor respects America under a compromised and craven Biden administration.
That much was predicted before Joe Biden’s presidency, and has been clear from its outset.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders made their position known early and often in word—hitting their Biden administration counterparts with a barrage of anti-American invective at the infamous March 2021 Anchorage, Alaska, “reset” meeting—and deed—flexing their muscles months later with a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile test.
For its part, the Biden administration has rewarded the CCP for its malevolence and invited still more aggression not only in its weak and flat-footed responses, but also in its actions. It has let the People’s Republic of China (PRC) off scot-free for its central role in the coronavirus pandemic and—seemingly at the request of its regime—cut sweetheart deals to dispose of criminal cases against prominent Chinese nationals, and killed the FBI’s critical counterintelligence program, the China Initiative.
So, few should have been surprised that Beijing saw fit to brazenly violate America’s airspace on the eve of a high-level meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, sending a spy balloon the PRC patronizingly claimed was meteorological, of the kind capable of delivering an electromagnetic pulse weapon or hypersonic missile that could cause catastrophic damage, soaring over our most sensitive sites. This was a demonstration of strength that also almost assuredly aimed to probe—to test our reflexes and resolve.
Nor should anyone have been surprised that the Biden administration failed this test. But baffling aspects of its frequently-shifting response raise questions perhaps more troubling, and revealing, than whatever information the balloon might have beamed back to China before being blasted out of the sky, and its leaders might have gleaned about our intelligence and defensive capabilities.
In a new piece at the Epoch Times, I raise five such lingering questions.
Read the whole thing here.