Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, noted yesterday on Twitter that "the U.S. political and media response to this balloon is not a particularly good sign for rational decision making on China in the years to come." To say the least.
Indeed the "response" has come almost entirely from the right, which quickly fashioned the argument that China's spy balloon over U.S. territory was an unprecedented act of international espionage, except for being but another sad example of a Democratic president's weakness.
Under Republican Trump, this never would have happened, or so the right's argument has gone. "I can nearly guarantee you that that balloon would not still be flying if we were still there," said former secretary of state Mike Pompeo to Fox News' Sean Hannity last week. Trump himself has displayed his usual humility.
But, as Bloomberg News reported on Friday, the Chinese did float a "Blimp" over the United States when Trump was president. "Previous incursions occur[ed] during the Trump Administration," wrote Bloomberg.
The Associated Press has also reported that Chinese spy balloons have been detected near U.S. military sites in Hawaii in the past five years. The Wall Street Journal, too, has reported on Chinese balloons having flown over the U.S.: "China has sent surveillance balloons over the continental U.S. on at least a handful of occasions," said U.S. officials — including during Trump's presidency.
Even the U.S. defense department was moved to issue this statement last week: "Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years."
And again yesterday: "The Defense Department has notified Congress of several previous incursions of U.S. airspace by Chinese surveillance balloons, with earlier sightings near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam, U.S. officials said Sunday, as Republicans criticized the Biden administration for allowing a suspected surveillance balloon to track across much of the United States," reports The Washington Post. "The defense officials said that several of those events occurred during the Trump administration."
Writes Forbes: "But an unnamed source from the Trump administration insisted [the earlier sightings were not] a big deal."
According to Donald Trump Jr., however, they would have been a big deal had they happened under his father's administration, which they did.Yesterday I somehow managed to watch a few minutes of ABC's "This Week." Host, Jonathan Karl; guest, Sen. Marco Rubio. Only after providing the Republican pol a lengthy platform to tell horrifying tales of this unprecedented event, which has almost certainly done unprecedented harm to America's national security, said Rubio, did the host bother mentioning that other spy balloons had been spotted in the past.
Rubio's eyes locked into a kind of paralyzed terror. Uh-oh. Here it comes. But it was not to worry for the Republican senator, since Karl then immediately cut to a commercial break.
Like Ben said: "The U.S. political and media response to this balloon is not a particularly good sign for rational decision making on China in the years to come.