I have lived through some tiresome news cycles in my life but this Chinese balloon cycle was one of the worst. The hysteria was completely inane, particularly on the right but among the media as well. But it is a story and it’s bizarre enough that a little calm expertise is called for. James Fallows is not only a great journalist but also an aviator and a China hand so his analysis is particularly astute:
I. The Chinese Balloon
Q: Do we believe the Chinese government statement that this was just a science-oriented weather mission?
A: No.
Q: Then what could the people who launched it conceivably have been thinking?
A: Who knows. At the moment I can imagine three possibilities, all bad.
-First, this could have been a screwup in the most basic sense. Whoever launched it thought the jet-stream winds would keep it over Canada, rather than dipping into the U.S. Of course that would still mean traversing airspace of a NATO member, and of course it would mean crossing Alaska before that.
This possibility is conceivable but not likely.
-Second, this could have been a screwup within the Chinese leadership. Some military hothead might have thought that sending the balloon would be a great way to poke the “declining” Americans, while prove his or her own “fighting spirit” initiative, and also demonstrating China’s technical and military prowess.
There’s a precedent. Back in 2007 it appears that some Chinese military hothead shot down a satellite, without letting the leader at the time, Hu Jintao, in on the plans. Maybe this has happened again?
-Third, this could have been a screwup in the grand-strategic sense. Perhaps the all-knowing, all-wise Xi Jinping approved the plans, as a way of demonstrating China’s technical and military prowess, and putting the Americans on guard.
None of these possibilities is great. They don’t represent a Chinese “threat,” as I’ll argue below. But they increase the China “problem.”
For the record, it’s also possible that the whole situation is a giant misunderstanding. Maybe it’s not a Chinese balloon at all? Unlikely, but conceivable. We’ll see.
Q: Did China “lose face” from this episode?
A: Judge for yourself. The U.S. announced it was tracking the balloon. It shot the balloon down as soon as it knew that the payload would fall over the ocean rather than onto inhabited U.S. land—and managed the mission so the payload would end up within relatively shallow “U.S. territorial waters.” The balloon was bumbling along; the F-22s were purposeful and effective.
I don’t know how this is being conveyed within China’s media bubble. But in the rest of the world the media image is of fighter planes zooming up to take out a drifting balloon.
You don’t have to be Tom Cruise to judge the strength-vs-weakness in the optics thereof.
Q: What might the Chinese have hoped to learn from a balloon, that they don’t already know from satellites, and spies, and TikTok?
A: Again I don’t know. I hope we’ll learn more once the balloon’s payload is fished out of the water and examined.
One thing the Chinese (or anyone else) would not learn much about concerns the placement of U.S. nuclear-deterrent forces. That information has been on the record for decades.
I, personally, have flown a little single-engine plane at 3,500 feet above U.S. nuclear-submarine bases—not 60,000 feet up, like this balloon. I have done this many times, above bases both on the East Coast and the West.
What I did is perfectly legal. It would have been equally legal for any Chinese citizen who was a passenger or pilot on a helicopter or small plane. The listings are publicly available on any aviation chart.
Below you see a sample. P-50 on this points to a major U.S. nuclear-missile submarine base, along the Atlantic coast. This image comes from official FAA charts on my iPad. Any American who cares can find out where the nukes are. Any Chinese spy who doesn’t already know isn’t trying.
As Brian Schweitzer, the former governor of Montana, recently told Jim Robbins of the New York Times, the location of ICBMs across the plains states is hardly a secret:
“I grew up in a little farmhouse a mile from an intercontinental missile,” he said. While the missiles are underground and not visible, Mr. Schweitzer said, you can drive up to the facility and take a photo. “Taking a rental car would be a lot cheaper than sending a balloon from Beijing,”
The exact Lat/Long locations for hundreds of the sites are freely available online. I’ll do my symbolic part for national security by not listing them here. Chinese or Russian spies would have found them many years ago.
Here is a sample image, freely available on Google Earth, of a ‘Little House on the Prairie’ in one of the Plains states. It happens to have a nuclear-warhead ICBM just down the road. The blue arrow points toward the house. The red arrow points to the nuclear missile that could be part of World War III. Anyone can find this, even without a spy balloon.
And here is another missile site, a few miles from a small farming community also in the plains.
Again, you can find hundreds of these on Google Earth. Did the balloon tell Chinese officials something the rest of the world didn’t already know? Cell phone signals, or something? Maybe, and we’ll wait for more info.
But the “menace” of flying over missile sites should be at the bottom of Americans’ worry lists.
Q: Was the U.S. ever “in peril” during this flyover?
A: Not from the balloon. Again, conceivably there is some peril: We don’t know what we don’t know. But on current evidence, this seems like a gigantic screwup on the Chinese side. It reveals simultaneously how far they might be willing to push things, and how bad they might be at doing so.
I would not want to be the person who pushed this great idea within the Chinese leadership.
It looks like this wasn’t the new Cuban Missile crisis after all. Go figure.