And so it seems the Chinese spy balloon’s trek across America was a big misunderstanding—a string of bad luck and misperceptions on both sides—after all.
In a major piece by three of the Washington Post’s top national security reporters, officials say that the U.S. tracked the balloon from the moment it lifted off from Hainan Island on China’s southeast coast. Its route suggested it was meant to fly over Guam, but sharp winds swept it northeast to Canada, then southward across the United States.
It was not a weather balloon, as the Chinese government first claimed. Rather, its mission, like that of China’s vast fleet of similar balloons, was to spy on military facilities in the Pacific. But once it was sailing over the U.S., officials back in Beijing—as the Post puts it—“apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence” on military sites here.
However, if this account is true, it is not the case—as many critics and commentators have claimed—that China was “testing” President Joseph Biden’s resolve, or doing a “trial run” for some sort of balloon-borne attack later on, or anything of the sort.
Nor should it have triggered the diplomatic crisis that ensued, compelling Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a long-scheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping—the first time in six years that any secretary of state would have made such a trip, which many had hoped would soften the sharpening tensions between the two countries.
Both Washington and Beijing are to blame for the diplomatic crisis. Biden succumbed too quickly to the panic stirred by Republican critics and hawkish commentators, who viewed the specter of a 12-mile-high balloon as tantamount to an attack on the homeland. Still, the balloon did violate U.S. sovereign airspace, and Xi—once aware of the mistake and the resulting melee—could have calmed things down, and perhaps put diplomacy back on track, by coming clean on what happened. Instead, his spokesmen first claimed that it was a weather balloon, then charged that the U.S. had sent many spy balloons over Chinese territory, too. This only thickened the air of distrust.
This isn’t the first time that misperceptions have heightened tensions between two adversaries. The good news is that, this time, the ensuing spiral of charges and counter-charges didn’t spark a war—though, if tensions had been sharper or if some other crisis had been going on at the same time, it could have.
In any case, we should all come away from this episode with some very serious lessons.
First, worst-case explanations of a surprising event aren’t always accurate, even if they seem obvious. In the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, the U.S. intercepted a phone call between two Iraqi officers discussing whether a chemical-weapons site had been cleaned up in advance of a visit by U.N. inspectors. This seemed a clear sign that the Iraqis, in violation of a U.N. resolution, were moving chemical weapons in order to deceive the inspectors. However, as the U.S. learned from interviewing those officers after the war, they were simply making sure that the site had been completely cleaned up back in 1991, in compliance with a U.N. resolution after the first Gulf War.
Second, at least as long as two countries aren’t at war with each other, they should keep communications channels open, especially between top military officers, who can sometimes speak frankly outside the confines of political talking-points or propaganda. It may be significant that U.S.-China tensions have resulted in the shutdown of many such channels. Had they remained open, the true mission of the balloon and the reason for its flight across North America might have been cleared up from the get-go.
U.S. and Chinese diplomats have managed their way through much thicker crises than this one. In 2001, a U.S. EP-3 signals-intelligence aircraft and a Chinese J-8 fighter plane collided in mid-air off Hainan Island, killing the Chinese pilot and resulting in the detention and interrogation of the 24 EP-3 crew members. Officials in Washington and Beijing hammered out a suitably ambiguous statement that allowed both sides to save face and that kept tensions under wraps. Today’s officials should study the resolution of this incident very closely.
It is noteworthy that, when Blinken called off his trip to Beijing, he said the meeting was “postponed,” not canceled. A few days later, John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, stressed the distinction. When it’s re-scheduled, it will probably be not with Xi but with Blinken’s Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi; in fact, it may happen this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, which both officials plan to attend. If they and their bosses—Biden and Xi—are willing, these two top diplomats should be able to clear away the dust, perhaps release a statement that declares mutual understandings about overflight rights (in non-judgmental language), and re-pave a path to something like normal (if still competitive, somewhat adversarial) diplomatic relations.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union cooperated in many productive peace-building ways through the far more hostile decades of the Cold War; the U.S. and China should be able at least to set up some forums that prevent something like the balloon folly from blowing up into a war.
