Some things are new about this incursion, but most of its features are not-including the sending of balloons over an adversary’s territory, as the United States itself once did not only with the Soviet Union, as many experts have commented, but also, in fact, with China, as fewer people have observed. interests or even to advertise the strength of the country’s political system. Moreover, turning the balloon incident into a hysterical partisan event, where the measurement of performance becomes posturing about toughness toward China, is far from the best way to protect U.S. Meanwhile, reminiscent of the missile gap scare of the Cold War, recent days have even seen the emergence of reports that China’s nuclear missile program, still vastly smaller than that of the United States, has grown-and citing some Republican lawmakers in Congress who say that fact is worthy of alarm and demands a response. I will return to the history of such efforts in a future column. To compete better with China, the United States is now rushing headlong toward the kind of industrial policy that focuses on the manufacturing of computer chips, with scant public debate or review of the efficacy of past efforts of this kind, including by China, which many experts would say has been a costly failure. It is the United States’ recent response, frankly, that worries me more. Throughout his time in power, Xi has increasingly broken with his predecessors’ diplomatic schtick of false modesty for his country while exhibiting an open willingness to compete with and challenge the United States in direct and even frontal ways.Īmericans have not been used to being systemically challenged by anything like a peer competitor since the demise of the Soviet Union-and I, for one, find China’s willingness to exhibit its colors to be healthier and more manageable than the previous era of camouflaged ambitions was. ![]() ![]() Despite the ritual use of the phrase “win-win” by Chinese diplomats in that era, achieving this goal has always meant bringing the United States down a peg or two as much as it has meant doing whatever Beijing can do to elevate China-because power can only ever be understood in relative terms. For most of the post-Mao Zedong era, which began in 1976, Beijing went to great lengths to conceal the nature of its ambitions-which have always involved returning China to a position it has enjoyed throughout almost all of its long history as one of the world’s foremost powers. The good news that comes from this incident is that it has helped further lay bare that the relationship between the United States and China has become one of outright, near-adversarial competition over global power and influence. ![]() First came a rare statement of diplomatic regret, then denial that the balloon was anything other than an ordinary weather monitoring device, and finally a tin-eared dudgeon: In effect, “How dare you shoot down our vessel?” and “We reserve the right to respond in defense of our legitimate rights.” Instead, Beijing’s response was shoddily improvised, confused, and risibly untrue. Whether by outright calculation or inattention, the Chinese state-led by President Xi Jinping-felt no need to conceal an information-gathering operation as bold as this nor even to prepare a cover story that ordinary people would be comfortable delivering with a straight face. “And by the way: China, if you’re listening-which, you obviously are-next time, why don’t you make your balloon the color blue so we can’t see it in the sky,” Chelsea Handler joked on The Daily Show. The Chinese balloon incursion needs to be understood in two strongly contrasted ways though, and only one of them has received much focus: What does this tell us about Beijing today? That question is fairly easy to answer-so easy, in fact, that the best interpretation I’ve seen so far came from a comedian not particularly known for her deep insights into U.S.-China relations. ![]() airspace by a Chinese balloon, providing ever more information to the public about Beijing’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, this might seem like a peculiar time to amplify the response that some people had to the craft’s early sightings: Calm down. With the aperture gradually widening on the recent incident involving the transit of U.S.
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