Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to travel to Beijing on Sunday — the highest-level visit for a U.S. official to China since 2018 — but you might say that inflation (not the economic kind) has derailed diplomacy.
The problem: a giant white balloon hovering over Billings, Montana.
Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder first briefed reporters about the balloon on Thursday night. Ryder said it was a high-altitude surveillance balloon, and a senior defense official said the Pentagon had high confidence it was Chinese. The Pentagon said it had considered shooting down the balloon, but the risk of debris hitting people below was too great. Officials also said the upside of doing so was limited, given the balloon posed no military threat and had limited surveillance value.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the balloon had floated over from China but told a different story about what it was doing in the U.S. Late Friday night China time, a spokesperson said it was a civilian weather balloon that had gone astray.
Affected by the westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course,” the spokesperson said. “The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into U.S. airspace.”
U.S. defense officials were unconvinced by that narrative. On Friday, Ryder said the balloon was “maneuverable” — as in, not likely to veer off course — and that it had moved eastward, to the central U.S.
In response to the incident, Blinken decided to postpone his trip to China, Bloomberg reported.
It’s a dizzying turn of events, raising questions about spycraft generally and the U.S.-China relationship in particular.
If it was a “spy balloon,” what information was it collecting? Why — having tracked it for days — did the Pentagon go public when it did? And how common is balloon espionage — a practice that dates back centuries? As for the U.S.-China relationship, was it necessary to cancel the Blinken trip?
Ever since a relatively positive face-to-face November meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Biden, the U.S. and China had been tracking toward a reboot of diplomacy. Hopes weren’t high for Blinken’s trip, but the aim was to place “guardrails” on a relationship that has been increasingly fractious and bring the countries together to deal with climate change, global health issues and more. Now, a mysterious balloon has — for the moment — stopped the diplomacy in its tracks.
Grid spoke with Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security, to get at the questions — about the balloon, the U.S.-China relationship and the potential geopolitical fallout.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grid: What was your initial reaction when you saw the news about the balloon yesterday?
Jacob Stokes: It is obviously a very important development. I think it’s certainly notable because we don’t often directly see Chinese activities related to the continental United States. A lot of times when we’re talking about U.S.-China geopolitical competition, we’re talking about places primarily in East Asia, places like Taiwan or the South China Sea. I think what this shows as well is that the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China includes China spying on the United States, using a wide variety of means. That’s something that certainly those of us in the national security community know and have sort of taken for granted. But this was a very visible reminder of that fact.
G: This isn’t the first balloon that has been seen over the U.S. in recent years, according to the Defense Department. [A balloon was also intercepted by U.S. Pacific Air Forces over Hawaii last February.] What can balloons provide to the Chinese military versus other kinds of surveillance technologies?
JS: In a very general sense, a lot of the information that can be collected by surveillance balloons can probably be detected through other methods, such as spy satellites, and other types of overhead surveillance. [”Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective,” a senior defense official told reporters on Thursday.]
But at the same time, some of these balloons can stay in one place for a longer period of time than satellites can, as they move around the globe at rapid speeds. Sometimes that can be useful. And also, the U.S. can track China’s spy satellites pretty easily. It’s a little bit harder to track these types of balloons, although clearly the fact that we caught it shows that we have a pretty effective capability of tracking these types of balloons, in general. [Other experts have pointed out other advantages. “High or very high-altitude platforms have a lot of benefit for their endurance on station, maneuverability and also flexibility for multiple payloads,” Tom Karako, senior fellow for the International Security Program and Missile Defense Project director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Politico.]
But it’s also indicative of the fact that a lot of intelligence collection is about combining different sources and methods. Combining what you would get from cyber surveillance with satellite surveillance with information gathered through balloons like this. Those kinds of things build out a more fulsome picture. So my sense is, that’s the thinking behind China deciding to operate balloons like this.
The Chinese position is that it’s a civilian airship that was essentially blown off course. That is not terribly believable. It could be true, but it’s probably not true. But even if it is true, there isn’t a fine line — or much of a division — between civilian and military activities in China. There aren’t a lot of bureaucratic or legal barriers to sharing information. So if it’s operated by a civilian entity versus a military entity, it doesn’t really matter.
G: Assuming that this is not a fully civilian balloon, why Montana? What is the military value of parking a balloon over the state?
JS: I think the intelligence value of a balloon over Montana is pretty clear because that’s the site of one of the U.S. nuclear missile fields [Malmstrom Air Force Base]. That is at least the most obvious intelligence collection target that a balloon flying over Montana would probably be trying to gather information on.
Certainly that would be a set of targets that obviously has a lot of national security value for the U.S. We’re trying to protect information about the operations on that base as much as possible.
I think broadly speaking, China probably uses balloons like this to gather intelligence on U.S. military facilities. There’s some in Alaska, certainly, they’re located all over the country. The fact that U.S. defense officials have said this isn’t the first time they’ve been tracking these types of balloons suggests that there’s an ongoing campaign by China to use these platforms to gather intelligence.
G: Bloomberg just reported that Blinken is going to postpone his trip to Beijing. What do you make of the U.S. response so far?
JS: I think that the U.S. response so far has been firm but measured. The decision to publicize this particular set of events, recognizing that it’s a sensitive time, suggests that Washington and the Biden administration are not looking to salvage this particular diplomatic process or diplomacy with China at the expense of U.S. interests, but rather, this type of diplomacy with China is meant to advance and protect U.S. interests.
I would imagine it’s a difficult decision to cancel the trip. One of the broad goals for the Biden administration, and what Xi Jinping and Joe Biden agreed to last fall was to try to keep diplomacy going and channels of communication open, despite the fact that there are all these areas of tension. And indeed, because there are all these areas of tension, we want to prevent any individual incident from spiraling out of control.
G: It seems, given the postponing of the trip, at least for now, that the communication channels — at least in person — are going to be closed because of this incident. What is the significance of that?
JS: There’s no question that this is an obstacle, at least a speed bump if not a full barrier to moving that process forward. We’ll have to see if the trip gets rescheduled once U.S. officials have had a chance to step back and ask themselves what this means and really do an assessment of what’s going on in this area, both from the White House but also in consultation with members of Congress as well.
Broadly speaking, in U.S.-China diplomacy, there’s always going to be things that come up in the context of this very tense relationship. And that’s really the diplomatic challenge that Washington is trying to figure out or address. How do you keep the relationship peaceful and stable while protecting your interests in values in a firm way in consultation with your allies around the world? Striking that balance is always going to be difficult in practice. This is just the latest example of that.
This incident really reminds me of the January 2011 incident when Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing meeting with his Chinese counterparts, and the Chinese military did a test flight of its — at the time relatively new — stealth fighter, the J-20. It wasn’t clear the degree to which that was meant as a signal to the U.S., or the defense secretary, whether it was some breakdown in the Chinese bureaucracies’ planning about when they conduct what type of operations. But nevertheless, it means these things do come up. And it’s going to be a challenge, but I don’t think it changes our basic understanding of the nature of U.S.-China relations.
G: Knowing that you’ve been in government previously, if you were advising Blinken’s team in this moment, given that there will be constant tensions and flare ups in the relationship, do you think you would have advised postponing this trip? Or would you have tried to work through the tensions and carry on with the trip?
JS: That’s a good question. I would have probably advise continuing to go. Because one of the things that we’re trying to get the Chinese to do is not to cancel trips. If there is something, some event in the vicinity the days and weeks that precede [a trip], and if our argument is we need more — not less — diplomacy as tensions grow, then we have to show that we’re ready to go and talk about these issues as they happen.
But at the same time, I don’t have access to all the information they’re seeing on the outside. They may be seeing something or notice something about this incident that’s not appropriate for public release at this time. And certainly they’re going to be in communication with counterparts in Beijing about this issue.
G: It seems like there is growing interest from China after the Bali meeting in trying to build up that diplomacy a little bit more. Assuming that this was, in some part, intentional, why would they have sent this balloon now, knowing that it could be seen as a signal and cause an uncontrollable chain of events as we’re seeing?
JS: I think the reason you would send a balloon like this, is that it’s possible it’s meant to some sort of diplomatic signal — but it’s much more likely that this balloon was operating as part of a set of normal intelligence gathering operations and that it hadn’t been coordinated throughout the Chinese government. Or because these operations may have been taking place on an ongoing basis, China hadn’t made the plan for this to be the time when the balloons were spotted and that U.S. officials decided to make the discovery more public.
So it’s hard to know. But my sense, especially given what we’ve seen in the Chinese statement, where they use the word “regret,” is that China regrets that the balloon had come into the United States; that to me — having read a lot of Chinese Foreign Ministry statements and the fact that China these days rarely admits any sort of wrongdoing or any regret — suggests that they wanted to keep the trip on the books and to have it go forward.
It’s gotten a huge amount of attention because it’s coming at a really challenging moment in the relationship. I think we knew that the very small diplomatic opening but nonetheless the meaningful one that came out of the Xi-Biden movement was going to face tests sooner rather than later. This is the first time the plans are coming into contact with a very difficult reality. We’ll have to see how it develops.