Editorial
“No-body can be uncheered with a balloon” is one of English writer and children’s poet A.A. Milne’s best-known quotes. What he wrote is certainly true of almost everyone, not just kids. People’s fascination with balloons is hard to explain – perhaps because they seem kind of magical.
Of course, they aren’t. They are very real, not just as playthings for our little ones but also, for instance, as research tools.
However, if balloons enter the political realm, things can quickly assume a dramatically uncheered dimension.
That’s what happened earlier this month when a Chinese balloon happened to fly over US airspace.
While Beijing insists that the balloon was a civilian unmanned weather research craft with limited navigation capability that blew off course due to force majeure, Washington claims that it was a surveillance balloon deliberately sent by China into its airspace.
After the balloon had been spotted over Montana early this month, US Secretary for State Antony Blinken abruptly called off a working visit to Beijing.
Blinken, with experience in senior positions in national security and foreign relations for over two decades, finally held an informal meeting with China’ top diplomat Wang Yi on the sidelines of the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
My personal view is that both Blinken and Wang are highly qualified officials doing their best to defend their respective country’s national interest. Incidentally, that’s what I, an adherent of international relations’ school of realism since my university years in Munich, would expect from any foreign minister. (In the context of the 27-nation EU I do wonder increasingly what kind of and whose interests some of their foreign ministers and external relations officials in Brussels do actually defend; but that’s another story).
Before that meeting, Wang – one of the world’s most seasoned foreign affairs officials with more than three decades of experience on the diplomatic front, told the 59th Munich Security Conference at the Bayerischer Hof, one of Germany’s grand hotels, that the US reaction to the balloon was “hysterical and absurd”.
I would add that Washington’s reaction was also rather hypocritical, considering that it publicly takes great pride in its global surveillance capabilities – such as concerning our planet’s weather.
Wang, known not to mince words when he believes that it is in the national interest, accused the Biden administration of its “misguided” perception of China. He also told reporters, obviously tongue in cheek, during a Q&S session that “there are many balloons from many countries in the sky. Do you want to down each and every of them?” Referring to Biden’s decision to shoot down the Chinese balloon, Wang urged Washington “not to do such preposterous things simply to divert attention from its own domestic problems.”
The Chinese balloon was shot down over US waters on February 4.
According to Xinhua, Wang, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, urged the US during his meeting with Blinken in the Bavarian capital late Saturday (local time) to “correct its mistakes, acknowledge and repair the damage it has done to China-US relations over the Chinese civilian unmanned airship incident.”
Foreign Ministry (FM) spokesman Wang Wenbin had already told a regular press conference in Beijing on Friday that the “unintended” entry of the Chinese unmanned airship into US airspace was “an entirely unexpected, isolated incident.” He urged Washington to “work in the same direction with China to manage [their] differences, handle this unexpected and isolated incident, avoid misunderstanding and miscalculation, and bring China-US relations back to the track of sound and steady development.”
The FM spokesman also said that “despite international law and customary practice, the US overreacted and abused the use of force by downing China’s unmanned civilian airship,” adding that “US balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace multiple times without China’s approval.”
The White House late last week seemed to be in damage control mood by taking the air out of the balloon spat with Beijing by acknowledging that preliminary evidence showed that three other unidentified aerial objects shot down by US fighter jets this month were not from China.
Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reported on Friday that the US military possibly expended a missile costing US$439,000 “to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about US$12” from a group of amateur balloon enthusiasts (who surely would concur with A.A. Milnes that “no-body can be uncheered with a balloon”) in Illinois.
Watching both CNN and Fox about the Chinese balloon saga confirmed my growing worry that US media are less and less reporting news and more and more spreading views that they wish to promote. Unfortunately, the balloon row once again gave “China threat” proponents a chance to air (quite literally!) their unsavoury claims that are not only erroneous but perilous.
I was surprised when Joe Biden said last week that he wished to talk to President Xi Jinping about the balloon incident “to get to the bottom of it”. I think that Blinken and Wang Yi, both with the assistance of other senior foreign affairs officials or even airspace experts from either side, should instead continue to work on tackling the balloon issue and remove it from the agenda of Sino-US ties as soon as possible.
China-US ties are the world’s most important bilateral relationship and there are a raft of key matters – such as trade and climate change – that the two heads of state ought to discuss. The world is facing a plethora of pressing issues that the international community of over 190 countries needs to tackle urgently – and that’s why it is high time (the Chinese balloon reportedly flew at an altitude of over 18,000 metres) to overcome the dispute and move on to more important questions.
– Harald Brüning
