Joe Biden is in political trouble. While this has been a constant state during his presidency, the trouble that Biden is in at this time could also cost the United States. Biden’s weak response to the Chinese spy balloon traversing the entire breadth of the United States unchallenged led to a bombastic and empty challenge during the State of the Union speech from the president to Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
“Make no mistake: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did,” Biden said referring to the belated shootdown of the balloon. Xi might have chuckled at that last statement. If that’s the most forceful response Biden can come up with, China can relax.
Indeed, the threat was more for domestic political consumption. “Ooooh … see how brave and tough our president is?” when no one in the national security community believes that. As for Beijing, they’re annoyed — as if they’re shooing away a fly that’s buzzing around their head.
“For the United States to insist on using armed force is clearly an excessive reaction that seriously violates international convention,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “China will resolutely defend the legitimate rights and interests of the enterprise involved, and retains the right to respond further.”
The danger here is that Biden will overreact to retrieve his domestic political position. And Xi, already damaged within the Communist party for his botched COVID-19 response, may do a little overreacting himself to show the apparatchiks he’s still in charge.
But Biden’s comments underscored how opposition to China, which has been crystalizing here for several years, has now become a rallying and unifying point in US politics. China has long mounted a broad intelligence campaign against the US, using satellites, cyber and traditional methods of collection. The US also has extensive intelligence operations targeting China. But the sight of a balloon tracking across the US, visible from the ground and on blanket television coverage, encapsulated a potential threat to US sovereignty from China as never before amid talk that a new Cold War may be dawning.
Biden’s frank comments also served as an important milestone in the increasingly tumultuous competition between the US and China. For much of the past 20 years, US policy had been designed to usher China into the global system as a competitor but not an adversary, including with its entry into the World Trade Organization. But China’s huge economic growth and increasingly diplomatic belligerence has many Americans now considering that approach a failure. The US shift to talking about establishing guardrails for the relationship and for the need to protect the Western-led rules-based international system is resented in China and seen as an attempt to check its rightful destiny as a world power.
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Fuzzy-headed thinking about China over the last 25 years from presidents of both parties has led us to this inflection point in history. Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Trump all thought they had the magic formula to deal with China, entice them into friendship with the U.S., and rule the world together in peace.
As moronic as that sounds, it was basically U.S. policy — until the last week.
The president spoke as an already volatile situation with China over the balloon got worse. The top Chinese official in Washington, Xu Xueyuan, had earlier lodged “stern representations” in demarches to senior State Department and national security officials, the Chinese embassy said in a statement, complaining that the US had used force to attack the balloon. National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson disdainfully responded by saying, “It was clear they are scrambling to do damage control, rather than credibly address their intrusion into our airspace.”
China initially expressed regret at what it claimed was a civilian airship that had crossed into US air space. But its response has hardened since the balloon was shot down. The Pentagon said earlier Tuesday that China had refused a request by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for a conversation with his counterparts in Beijing after it was shot down. What is unclear now is whether the Chinese stance will lead to months of severed communication between the rivals – a dangerous situation given the proximity of their forces and possibility of miscalculation in the South China Sea – or whether once the rhetorical grandstanding is over, they will reengage.
Perhaps the biggest problem for our addled president is that he’s managed to do something no other post-World War II president has ever done: be on the cusp of conflict with three nuclear powers — Russia, China, and North Korea. Managing volatile relationships with three nations and their aggressive foreign policies is enough for any president to handle. But an 80-year-old, fading, bumbling fool in charge during the most dangerous period in world history should worry everyone.
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