This month is the first anniversary of the infamous Chinese spy balloon incident. It's an incident worth recalling for several reasons beyond the fact that it set back US-China relations for several months. Everything from the balloon's launch to its shooting down was mismanaged by both governments, providing lessons that may or may not have been learned.
Lessons Learned?
The first lesson stems from the question whether or not deploying the balloon over the US, near to a US military base in Montana, was a Chinese leadership decision. We're pretty clear now that it wasn't, but at the time it was treated in Washington as though the balloon was the brainchild of Xi Jinping himself. Since then, the Biden administration has reversed course, starting with the President's own assertion that Xi probably did not know about the balloon's mission. Xi "got very upset" over it, Biden said in the same off-camera remarks in which he called Xi a dictator. The Biden administration "wants to bury [the incident] because they know that Xi Jinping really didn't have anything to do with it, that it wasn't some sort of effort against the United States and that no one intended it to be over Montana," said Dennis Wilder, former National Security Council director for China, has said. U.S. officials confirmed two weeks after the shoot-down that winds had blown it off course.
The lesson here applies to government decision making everywhere: What might initially appear to be a calculated, high-level move by an adversary may turn out to be the ordinary operations of a bureaucracy—in this case, the division of the Chinese military responsible for spy balloons. That reality can be consequential today when we see many Chinese spy balloons over Taiwan. Are they a harassment that the People's Liberation Army regularly conducts or a security threat devised by the Chinese party leadership to weaken Taiwan's will?
On the US side, conservatives in Congress argue that the Biden administration's decision making during the balloon incident was influenced by a desire to placate Beijing. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the retiring chair of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement recently: "China House [the year-old State Department Office of China Coordination] seems to have spent 2023 accommodating the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and axing key defensive actions like export controls and sanctions." That drew a retort from Rick Waters, the assistant secretary of state then in charge of that office. "The idea that in the middle of the balloon incident, where we pulled down Blinken's trip, that we were somehow pulling our punches didn't make sense," Waters said in an interview. "If we had been pulling our punches, we would have gone ahead with the trip." I disagree: If keeping up the momentum from the Biden-Xi summit in Bali was policy, the Blinken trip should have gone ahead. That would have been strategic thinking, not accommodation of China. Instead, the administration probably acted in some part out of fear of the far right's accusations, represented by Gallagher's statement, of being soft on China.
A second lesson is to ask questions before shooting. The incident set off crisis-level accusations—from Washington, that the balloon was a strategic threat, hence needed to be shot down, and from Beijing that the balloon was for weather forecasting, and that the US was engaged in hysterical accusations. Neither accusation was correct: It was a spy balloon, but hardly of the sort that needed to be treated as an imminent threat and shot down. The fact, according to the Pentagon, seems to be that the balloon did not carry any special spy technology.
Lesson 3 is to get your story straight. What exactly did the balloon carry? Then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley said last September that "there was no intelligence collected by that balloon." The Pentagon backs that claim, saying the balloon "did not collect any intelligence while it transited the United States and that it did not transmit any intelligence back to China." But the Pentagon, which had promised to publicly release all information on the balloon's capability and its data, has never done so, fueling right-wing and other theories about the China threat and a Pentagon coverup in deference to getting along with China.
Apologies and Diplomacy
A fourth and final lesson: apologies are important. One of the scantily reported upshots of the balloon incident is that China apologized. "The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into U.S. airspace," China's foreign ministry said. An apology from Beijing is a rarity, yet the Biden administration did not acknowledge the apology. Granted, the apology fell short of saying that the balloon was on a spy mission. Nevertheless, the administration could have accepted the apology, recognized that the balloon was not the result of a top-level Chinese decision, and moved on with Blinken's trip. Official apologies generally are few and far between in international relations, in large part because they're believed to betray weakness and give the opponent an edge. When they do occur, they should be taken seriously, which is not what happened a year ago.
Rest assured that the balloon incident will take its place beside other dicey incidents in US-China relations, such as the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy during the war in the former Yugoslavia, the downing of a Chinese jet near Hainan in 2001, and Chinese missile tests near Taiwan during its 1996 presidential elections. All these incidents involved crisis management that avoided a more serious confrontation. Let's hope that smore adept diplomacy puts memories of these incidents to rest.
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