balloons and rebooking
Blinken's postponement
A colleague opined he could not believe that Secretary Blinken postponed his scheduled visit to the Middle Kingdom today. As you likely know, the State Department announced he would not travel in light of the balloon floating over Montana which the Defense Department confirmed yesterday.
The issue is not the balloon, though China’s reported ‘regret’ is still interesting. As a senior China Hand who has spent literally much of his life there said publicly over twenty-five years ago, China never says it is wrong. Never. As you have read me noting over the past three months, the Mandate of Heaven doesn’t generally encourage a leader of any sort to acknowledge a mistake. The long term effects of such behaviour leads to doubts about many more things being errors which could lead to …. Thus, Beijing clumsily admitting it regrets the ‘research balloon’ incident is rather more than I frankly anticipated. If I read the stories correctly, it’s still up there so this is not the same as Nikita Khruschev gleefully showing the pieces of Francis Gary Powers’ crashed U2 before they unveiled Powers himself captured in May 1960. China says, of course, it was a weather research flight but zero people believe that unless research now is synonymous with spying at a high altitude.
The United States has its own history of crafty attempts during the Cold War to gather information gone wrong. The Powers’ incident was only one. We had espionage incidents in China, as a matter of fact, as John DeLury’s Agents of Subversion covers.
The key for the perpetrating nation is retaining plausible deniability, colloquially stated as ‘Why, no, we were not spying on you. That (plane, ship, person, dolphin, or whatever) was acting in a completely legitimate capacity because the plane, ship, dolphin, or whatever could in fact have been doing something legitimate’ even if it most probably was not.
The actions and consequences here are not really about the balloon. The bilateral relationship between the United States and China is just terrible right now. Blinken was to visit Beijig at the same time the U.S. House of Representataives is preparing one of the most prominent, wide-ranging policy oversight hearings in generations. The Biden administration, like those of Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41, and probably even Trump, should expect harsh questioning about intentions, instruments, aspirations, players, and any other aspect of our interactions with the Middle Kingdom, leading to condemnations of naivete or worse. While Representative Michael Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, has promised fair and appropriate inquiries, the suspicions regarding China are so overwhelming in the nation’s capital that I cannot imagine anyone will attribute value to ties of any sort with Beijing. The balloon will only harden the already granite-like positions many in both parties hold. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, has been one of the mainland’s betes noires for forty years. This incident will only show her deeply-held and articulated skepticism was correct.
We are hardly along in doubting the other side. Global Times, a mouthpiece for pretty radical nationalist views in China, regularly harangues the United States for its behaviour in Asia or around the world. Just yesterday, the publication attacked Secretary Lloyd Austin’s agreement securing U.S. enhanced basing in the Philippines, making a convoluted argument this was ‘zero sum’ mentality which obvioiusly it is to China.1
Their response today on the balloon was a tweet saying the balloon is a target so its presence is the skies above Montana indicates the decrepid state of the U.S. air defenses. Millions of China will agree with this position, fueling the nationalist sentiments which have grown over the past twenty years as China’s prowess grew. The Party wants to prove it returned China to a position of respect globally, feeding national pride as a result. Millions of Chinese who rarely travel abroad have little indication of how aggressive their nation appears in the eyes of much of the world.
Many U.S. and Chinese government voices simply see no reason for the two states to continue diplomatic engagement or much else these days, though that ignores the economic and trade intertwining that has been underway for 45 years. Secretary Blinken seemed to be planning to go to Beijing for the sake of meeting his counterparts.
Would that have justified the visit? Is diplomacy only based on securing previously identified major outcomes (deliverables in D.C. speak)? Arguably, no, that is not what diplomacy is about. It is the exchange of ideas, listening to positions regardless of how distasteful they are, hearing the stated objectives of an interlocutor, being demarched (formally condemned by another government) for an incident, and various excrutiatingly slow, deliberate long term conversations. Diplomacy, in short, is not for those expecting immediate results or quick victories as it rarely, particularly between Washington and Beijing, operates that way. Blinken’s trip, like that of other Foreign Ministers, Ambassadors, and even lower level diplomats, is an exercise in muscle-building: crafting a fuller understanding of China’s arguments while formally notifying them of our positions on a range of items. It is a tedious, careful, and in many ways redundant job that we must do well because when disputes turn to war, the results are violent, irreversible, and unpredictable. War is usually not the outcome of a failed diplomatic mission but its effects are so harsh that states most often try to talk as long as possible to avoid a situation leading to war. The current rhetoric in many quarters on both side of the Pacific sadly strike me as people who most definitely are already thinking about war to achieve the outcomes they want. No guarantee.
Blinken’s visit likely would have yielded little concrete but the frustration over China’s audacity with the balloon sealed the visit’s fate. I suspect Democrats probably advised the administration not to carry out the plan for fear it would fuel charges of the Biden White House being soft on China.
What I hope critics remember is that we probably have little ability to change China’s behaviour, whether Tony Blinken goes to Beijing. The Chinese leadership is a sovereign actor as is the Biden administration, each purusing national interests. Interests between states can conflict. Deterring a state we have defined as a ‘near peer competitor’ strikes me as far more difficult than it sounds. As you know from my prior musings, I think China’s regime is actually petrified of its own weaknesses and could see reacting to the United States as its saving grace in facing of a public the government has imbued with nationalist sentiments.
Cancelling this trip probably won’t make a big difference but the relationship is not going to heal itself. FIN
‘U.S. advances deal to access more military bases amid protests’, Global Times, 2 February 2023.