John Kirby, spokesman for the national security council, said yesterday that Chinese spy balloons flew over the US during the Trump administration on at least three occasions.
Added the head of the Pentagon's Northern Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck: "I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap" — yes a "D.A.P." in Pentagonese, also known as a blunder.
Neither is "U.F.O." adequate for PentagonSpeak. One explanation for Nothern Command's D.A.P., say US officials, "is that some previous incursions were initially classified as 'unidentified aerial phenomena,'" or "U.A.P.s," not a U.F.O.s (Someone's door deep in the labyrinthine guts of the Pentagon building has a plaque announcing the office's purpose: "Chief of Mind-Bending Neologisms."
You'll be unsurprised to learn that the chief of the Trump administration has declared that this recent history is Fake News.
On Truth Social, Trump also claimed — now deleted, it seems — that reports of Chinese intrusions into US airspace during his tenure are "fake disinformation," which, being a kind of double negative, would make the reports true.
I'm astonished that a Trump staffer actually noticed the site's "domain awareness gap" — that rarest of D.A.P.s, one of authentic social truth.
Also true — though entirely neglected by Republican demagogues — is that the Chinese Balloon Affair has been much more damaging to President Xi's reputation than whatever Joe Biden has sustained. US intelligence is beginning to wonder if the Chinese leader's left hand is unaware, at critical moments, of what the right one is doing.
"What has been particularly damaging for China, both internationally and domestically, are the questions this raises about competence and how they’re reinforcing doubts about Xi Jinping’s leadership," says Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state. Merely one doubt-reinforcement came after China expressed regret for the "incident"; it then abruptly, aggressively switched to castigating the US for shooting down the balloon.
The NY Times notes that the "balloon incident follows other apparent miscalculations, including the haphazard unwinding of his, at times, suffocating 'zero Covid' measures following widespread protests, and his agreeing to a 'no limits' partnership with Russia only weeks before the invasion of Ukraine."
It could be, as some US officials have speculated, that the People's Liberation Army occasionally gets ahead of Xi's diplomatic designs. If so, this presents a particularly scary prospect. Continues the Times: "Questions about Mr. Xi’s judgment and that of his military and intelligence services now cloud assessments about how China would handle another crisis in a far more dangerous setting such as over the heavily militarized Taiwan Strait."
What's not in question is that both US administrations, Trump's and Biden's, somehow overlooked or too casually dismissed Chinese spying operations over the states. Thus Republican rabble-rousers would be well advised to cease with their exclusive Biden-bashing and concentrate instead on helping to sharpen US intel operations.
This advice, however, will of course be downed by Republican demagogues more interested in cheap shots than America's national security.