Good morning, this is The Smoke Eater for Friday, February 16, and everyone hates the balloon guy.
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ABOVE THE FOLD
The destruction of a Chinese balloon spy balloon has kicked off what may be the dumbest scandal since former Vice President Dan Quayle's "potatoe."
On Feb. 1, a bi-partisan category five shitstorm floated into Montana and went largely unnoticed. It wasn't until Feb. 2 that senior defense officials were telling reporters there was "very high confidence" that this rather innocuous speck in the sky was a giant Chinese data vacuum. That's when wealthy congressmen and wannabe cowboys with second houses in flyover country began kissing their assets goodbye.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters that NORAD had been keeping an eye on a, "high-altitude surveillance balloon," adding the balloon didn't, "present a military or physical threat," because it was currently floating too high in the sky.
"Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years," Ryder added. "Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information."
President Joe Biden had already been briefed on the balloon and reportedly asked the military for options. The Pentagon told reporters that multiple senior defense officials recommended against shooting the thing down. Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin ultimately concluded that "kinetic action" (AKA: shooting it down) could lead to a shower of debris that could injure any civilian vulnerable to physics and gravity.
Besides, the threat of trigger-happy yokels indiscriminately shooting into the sky was bad enough. But there's a greater than zero chance some idiot could hoard shrapnel for useless internet points and six minutes on prime-time cable news.
The brass figured there wasn't much the Chinese could learn with a big balloon that TikTok and orbiting satellites didn't already have access to. Even if it was uncomfortably close to military bases housing ICBMs, an eight-year-old can find nuclear launch sites with a search engine. Besides, some defense officials felt it might be a unique opportunity to reverse engineer the Chinese espionage program in real-time.
Former Billings Gazette photographer Chase Doak was already gaining international media attention after snapping the first photo of the balloon from his driveway (which he jokingly called a UFO). Doak would give Billings' KTVQ what may be the saddest and most humbling statement a photojournalist has ever said.
"This is more attention than any of my photos or videos have received. And I’m not even in the news anymore...I’m happy to have played a part in history. I think as a photojournalist, that was something I always wanted to do." - Chase Doak, Montana photojournalist
Regardless, members of the congressional crackpot caucus shitposted demands the balloon be shot down, demands Biden say something they could criticize, and insisted this was a threat to national security.
The new and terribly named bi-partisan House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party released a three-sentence statement concluding, "the CCP threat is not confined to distant shores—it is here at home and we must act to counter this threat."
By 8pm, Kevin McCarthy, the overgrown-child wrangler and Speaker of the House, was shitposting that he had requested a briefing from the so-called "Gang of Eight" (members of congress who get intelligence briefings from the executive branch), and The Blob was questioning whether Secretary of State Tony Blinken should cancel a long-planned and fairly high-stakes trip to China the following week.
And that was just one God-forsaken day.
Just over 24 hours later, the balloon fight had turned into a brawl. Blinken had canceled his trip to China, calling it a "clear violation of US sovereignty and international law" during a presser with South Korean Foreign Minister Jin Park. House Foreign Relations Chair Michael McCaul fired off a statement calling on the Biden administration, "to quickly take steps to remove the Chinese spy balloon from US airspace." Respectable national security reporters were reduced to bird watchers as the talking heads began shamelessly fear mongering and clutching their collective pearls. Florida state legislators even jumped on the bandwagon, using it as a justification to ban TikTok in public schools. Florida state Sen. Danny Burgess told a gaggle of cable news blowhards, "...everybody is going to wake up and realize this needs to be done across the country."
Seizing on the absurdity, The Washington Post's Phillip Bump wrote a piece called, "How to build your own spy balloon" the detailed how regular, flag-waving American children can make similar balloons in the kitchen with a little help from their local espionage associate at Walmart.
I remember when Mr. Wizard did it in the 1980s.
By Saturday, Feb. 4, the stupid thing had floated out past Myrtle Beach and the US issued a Temporary Flight Restriction stretching from Wilmington, NC down to Charleston, SC. National security nerds began counting the seconds until the DOD released a statement confirming the end of our four-day national nightmare.
FUN FACT: The downing of the balloon became the first air-to-air kill by an F-22 Raptor. Conceived in the 1980s as a replacement for the F-15 Eagle, the F-22 finally rolled out in 2005. Production ceased in 2011 because it was hard to justify making expensive air-to-air fighter jets during the "War on Terror."
BELOW THE FOLD
After Blinken canceled his trip, China's Foreign Ministry released a statement saying the US and China never publicly announced a diplomatic visit. According to the Chinese, "making any such announcement is [the US'] own businesses."
Though the trip wasn't officially announced by Beijing, the White House did say Blinken would visit China after Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia on Nov. 14, 2022.
The Chinese have said the balloon had "deviated far from its planned course," and offered the closest thing to a rare public apology in saying, "The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure."
The Chinese have since changed their tune, threatening to retaliate "against the relevant US entities," and accused the US of sending 10 spy balloons over the last year -- an accusation the US denies. When Secretary Austin tried calling Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe shortly after the balloon was shot down, the Pentagon says the phone just kept ringing. China's defense ministry says Wei was giving Austin the silent treatment because the US had, "not created the proper atmosphere."
Some foreign policy nerds have wondered if the balloon operation(s) is being carried out independently by the Chinese military, The People's Liberation Army (PLA), and the PLA purposely never told the Foreign Ministry about the operation. But China's internal politics are a black box so it's impossible to know what's really happening.
Bloomberg reported Blinken was mulling over a meeting with China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, at the Munich Security Conference this weekend. Wang's visit comes after stops in France, Italy, Hungary, and Russia (the latter being a Chinese diplomat's first official visit since Putin invaded Ukraine almost a year ago) and comes at a time when much of Europe has grown exasperated with protectionist policies from the US and China, though many European nations remain more skeptical of China's global interests. There's hope that a meeting between Blinken and Wang could deflate tensions seeing as how the Biden administration has gone out of its way to deflate some of the pressure over the last two weeks.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary Austin were scheduled to meet with their respective Chinese counterparts, but those meetings have been called off in the wake of Balloon-Gate. Axios' Hans Nichols reports US officials saying those meetings could still happen, but nothing's on the schedule at the moment.
The US is still (arguably) in the middle of Trump's trade war. The Biden administration is moving to make the US a rival in silicon chip production and limit China's dominance in the manufacturing of new technologies. Many European nations are weaning themselves off of cheap, Chinese telecommunications systems over concerns about data privacy. All of this poses an existential threat to a country that has a population four times larger than the US.
But contrary to the vague newstickers or sensationalist clickbait, China has been attempting to mend international ties that have been strained in the last few years. A string of foreign policy failures, like COVID (and its isolationist "zero COVID" policy); the fallout Xi Jinping's aggressive "Wolf Warrior Diplomacy," the constant threats to neighbors; a disregard for basic human rights; support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; accusations of "debt-trap diplomacy" in Africa; the private sector's lack of autonomy; state-sanctioned intellectual property theft; declining birth rates and an opaque economy motivated by party politics have left many nations reevaluating once warm relationships with Beijing.
And rather than look at this as a chance to increase diplomacy, a disturbing number of Americans went even further than gun-fetishizing crackpots by claiming this was proof that this was proof of extraterrestrial life. The presumptions became loud enough that Biden had to make a public address about how common it is for research and commercial balloons to be floating around our big, blue marble.
BACK PAGES
It's unlikely Ukraine will be getting F-16s anytime soon. Then again, war nerds said the same thing about tanks just before the US and Germany reversed their initial decision not to send tanks in early December. But a lot of the arguments come down to F-16 pilots' training requirements, aircraft maintenance crew staffing, parts and munitions, and airfield maintenance and defenses. For example, F-16's big, belly-mounted engine can be screwed up by a rock from the already bombed runways necessary to get the jet in the air. Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the UK and the EU to meet with leaders and plead for more support. Zelenskyy delivered passionate speeches to the UK Parliament in Westminster Hall, and the European Parliament in Brussels where he received a five-minute standing ovation. Polish President Andrzej Duda told the BBC that it was a NATO decision, though Duda didn't rule it out, nor did French President Emanuel Macron. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz cast some doubt on sending jets, though he did add, "The position is unchanged: Russia must not win this war."
The far-right government of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is considering a change to wiretapping laws that have been critical in combating organized crime. Supporters of the measure argue that Italian law enforcement has been overly zealous with wiretaps, indiscriminately violating privacy rights. Opponents of the measure say they're indispensable in combating organized crime, pointing out that minions often snitch on their masters -- who often hold power positions in the Italian institutions, and are suspicious that this is coming as Meloni's government relaxes penalties for white-collar and financial crimes.
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban seem upset that government bureaucracy is more complicated than a guerilla war. A report from the non-profit Afghan Analysts Network detailing the lives of five former Taliban fighters who are now working in the capital of Kabul shows the men complaining about the monotony of office work, unaffordable rent, and social media addiction. Afghanistan's economy has collapsed without foreign aid and investment, and sanctions on the theocratic government's rollback of women's rights have only exacerbated the humanitarian crisis. Conditions are so bad, RFE/RL's Radio Azadi reports, many Afghans have resorted to the booming crystal meth trade. Though the Taliban has banned narcotics like meth and opium, some drug laws aren't enforced as the drug trade is a major source of revenue for the cash-strapped government and its people. Political tensions are now spilling out into the public after a speech by Sirajuddin Haqqani, Taliban Interior Minister and leader of the militant terrorist group, the Haqqani Network. Without naming reclusive Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, Haqqani -- who supports relaxing bans on women in public and schools -- criticized the monopolization of power behind hardline religious clerics.
ONE MORE THING...
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