Emma Ashford and Matthew Kroenig
Matthew Kroenig: Hi, Emma! I guess we can put in the work to write the column this week. The editors quashed my idea of just having ChatGPT do it for us. Are you up for it?
Emma Ashford: It’s safer to do it ourselves. If I’ve learned one thing from decades of movies about rogue AI, it’s that you really don’t want to put them in charge of defense policy. You want Skynet? Because, as the Terminator movies showed us, that’s how you get Skynet.
Of course, the big controversy of the week is not advanced AI technology but relatively low-tech surveillance techniques. Washington is going wild over the Chinese spy balloon that was spotted over U.S. territory last week. I haven’t heard this much complaining about inflatables since my 3-year old accidentally let her Mickey Mouse balloon float away.
MK: Well, I bet your 3-year-old did not let her balloon float away over U.S. nuclear-armed ICBM sites!
EA: I don’t know. We’re in D.C. here. There’s a decent chance the prevailing winds took Mickey straight over the White House and the Pentagon. Perhaps we should be more worried about Disney spying on our national security leaders.
But more seriously, why the freakout?
Balloons have many advantages for China. They are cheaper. They can hover over targets longer. They can take more granular images.
MK: I think there was good reason for the concern. China violated U.S. airspace and sovereignty to spy on some of the most sensitive military bases in the United States. The Chinese cover story that this was a weather balloon gone astray does not stand up to scrutiny.
Some were puzzled that China would use such a low-tech device given that it has satellites, but I’ve talked to technical experts who explain that balloons have many advantages for China. They are cheaper. They can hover over targets longer. They can take more granular images. And, unlike satellites—which once you put them in outer space, they stay there forever—balloons are retrievable.
Although, I guess this one wasn’t retrievable in the end.
You think this is much ado about nothing?
EA: I mean, it’s not nothing. This was clearly not a weather balloon and was apparently part of a pattern of balloon flights in recent years over the continental United States from China. We learned later that there were several flights during the Trump administration, too. U.S. leaders have every right to shoot the thing down and complain to the Chinese about this violation of national airspace. At the same time, states spy on each other all the time. Americans use all kinds of technology to gather intelligence on China and other states: satellites, phone tapping, computer intrusions, and even good old-fashioned human sources.
It just seems as if Washington blew this whole thing way out of proportion. In fact, it reminded me of one of the tensest incidents in the early Cold War, when the Soviet Union shot down U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers while he was doing surveillance of Soviet nuclear and military sites. Luckily, this balloon was unmanned, but the parallels are eerie.
MK: A few points. First, there is a difference between collecting intelligence from space or from spy planes in international airspace and violating a country’s sovereignty by flying through its national airspace.
EA: At what altitude does sovereign airspace end, though, and space begin? This was exactly the issue with the U-2. Washington thought the Soviet air defenses couldn’t reach high enough to shoot it down, but they could.
MK: Good question. It is not defined in international law. But, putting the historic U-2 flights aside for a moment, many people were drawing parallels with U.S. spy planes in the Indo-Pacific, but that is not an apt comparison because U.S. planes are collecting from international airspace.
I don’t begrudge China for trying to spy on the United States. As you say, these spy-versus-spy games are commonplace in international politics. But I also think the U.S. government was within its rights to be upset about it and to shoot the thing down.
You say Washington blew the episode out of proportion. What would you have recommended as a better response?
EA: To be clear, I’m not trying to make a moral equivalence here but rather pointing out that Americans shouldn’t be too quick to decry espionage techniques they almost certainly want to use themselves!
I really do think this whole incident was blown out of proportion. The media, and much of Washington, spent several days fretting about the balloon and what it meant about the rise of Chinese power. Richard Fontaine, the head of the Center for a New American Security here in Washington, wrote an op-ed in Foreign Policy titled “China’s Balloon Could Be America’s Awakening,” arguing that this might be the incident that finally gets the American people to accept that China is a major threat. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a trip to Beijing to meet his Chinese counterparts in protest.
Look, it was a balloon. It was collecting intelligence. Satellites overfly the United States every day taking similar pictures. It’s not a new Pearl Harbor.
MK: Pearl Harbor, no. But still concerning. I liked Fontaine’s piece, and Blinken was right to cancel the trip. I do think the incident will do more than anything else to awaken the American public to the threat from China. Think tank war games on a Taiwan Strait conflict or new congressional legislation on export controls do not really register for the average American. This incident was mocked on Saturday Night Live!
There was a giant enemy spy balloon flying across the country so low that it could be spotted from the ground. Some patriotic Americans (who have forgotten their high school physics) even tried to shoot it down themselves! With this ill-advised move, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may have done more to turn the U.S. public against China than anything leaders in Washington could hope to achieve.
Blinken shouldn’t have canceled his trip. Good diplomats can use that kind of leverage to their advantage—giving a stern lecture on sovereignty before pushing on other issues.
EA: It’s certainly a huge misstep by the Chinese government, whether it was some low-level bureaucratic actor or a decision by high-level leadership. They look foolish and overly aggressive. It’s the same kind of pushy policy that has driven a number of regional states in Asia away from China in recent years.
But that’s exactly why I think Blinken shouldn’t have canceled his trip. This was a great opportunity to capitalize on that Chinese embarrassment and push them on other issues such as nuclear crisis management. Good diplomats can use that kind of leverage to their advantage—giving a stern lecture on sovereignty before pushing on other issues—but by the time the next opportunity for a visit by Blinken rolls around, the tension and embarrassment of this incident will have faded. Canceling the trip gets him nothing, though I suspect the Biden administration was worried about looking soft on China to a domestic audience.
MK: You make some good points. Hawk engagement often makes sense.
But, in this case, I worry this was a deliberate finger in the eye from Beijing. They have a history of doing this kind of thing on the eve of big diplomatic visits. Mao Zedong intentionally let Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sit in a hot room for hours before seeing him. Then he asked Khrushchev to hold the meeting in the pool, knowing that Khrushchev could not swim. Mao swam laps around Khrushchev, who pathetically dog-paddled behind him.
When I worked in the Pentagon in 2011, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited China. It was the first time a U.S. defense secretary had visited China in several years. It was a big deal. As soon as he touched down, China conducted its first test of a new stealth fighter.
I think the intended message is: “We will humiliate you barbarians, and you still have no choice but to come to Beijing and kowtow before the emperor.”
I think Blinken was right not to play China’s game.
EA: Wow, you’re really mixing your historical allusions there. Even if you’re right, the problem with that approach is that it’s a recipe for no diplomatic engagement at all. And that would be an extremely dangerous place for the world’s two biggest military powers to be.
I’m concerned more generally about the balloon incident because I worry that it tells us a lot about how Washington might respond to future, more complex crises. The inclination among foreign-policy elites to use the incident to build a coalition for a more aggressive push against China, for example.
Or even the reports that when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to call his Chinese counterpart about the balloon, no one in Beijing picked up. This is part of a pattern: We try to set up crisis management mechanisms, and the Chinese won’t use them. It hardly matters in this case, but it doesn’t bode well for future, more dangerous crises. If there’s one thing we learned from the early part of the Cold War, it’s that the superpowers did not handle crisis well without some kind of direct channel to reduce misunderstandings and de-escalate tensions.
MK: It is not as if U.S.-China diplomacy will cease altogether. The United States maintains an embassy in China and vice versa. There is the United Nations. But sending a cabinet-level official after a possible deliberate provocation like that would have been seen as a sign of U.S. weakness in my opinion.
People also wondered whether President Joe Biden was going to explicitly reference the incident in his State of the Union address this week. He made a glancing reference to the incident without explicitly mentioning the word “balloon.”
What did you make of this passage and the foreign-policy elements of the speech overall?
EA: The State of the Union was largely focused on the domestic economy, so we got only a few token foreign-policy bits. But I flagged a couple of interesting things: Biden’s call to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” was surprising, at least to me, and concerning because it suggests that the White House is still not thinking strategically about where the Russia-Ukraine war is going and how we might want it to end. It’s also out of step with public opinion: 26 percent of the U.S. public now thinks the United States is doing too much in Ukraine, rising to 40 percent among just Republican voters. And almost half of Americans say Washington should push for peace soon.
MK: “As long as it takes” to do what? That is the question. As we’ve argued before, I am not sure Biden has a strategy. I am afraid he means, as long as it takes to fight to a draw and lock in the current territorial divisions.
EA: I also was interested in the political economy parts of the speech. Biden really emphasized the CHIPS and Science Act and his administration’s focus on decoupling critical supply chains from China. But it was really light on any proposed alternatives. As the political scientist Dan Drezner commented after the speech: “Do you like protectionism? Then you’re gonna love Joe Biden’s State of the Union!”
MK: Well, there were a lot of proposals about state intervention in the economy that made me uncomfortable. Free markets work. I don’t think eliminating “resort fees” should be one of the highest-priority items on Biden’s agenda. Apparently, some hotels add extra, hidden fees to the bill to cover the cost of keeping up the amenities. But this issue shouldn’t be occupying the brain cells of the leader of the free world!
EA: Oh, I don’t know. Those things make me so mad. Most of the time, it’s not even a resort!
MK: Ha. Then you can choose to stay somewhere that does not charge them!
But anyway, I think selective economic decoupling with China does make sense. We are only at the start of this process. There is still way too much U.S. technology being granted export licenses to go straight to the CCP. I am glad there is strong bipartisan support for protecting supply chains and friendshoring and reshoring.
The days of unfettered trade and investment with China—and of 1990s-style globalization more broadly—are done.
EA: There’s definitely a role for building secure supply chains for critical technologies and minerals, though I’m less sure that cheap plastic toys from China are a threat to national security. Selective decoupling does make sense.
But the problem is the alternative. The Biden administration talks about friendshoring but has done basically nothing on that front. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework—which was supposed to be the grand replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—isn’t even a trade deal; it’s just a “framework” for further negotiations. And what did Biden talk about in his speech? It wasn’t new trade deals, even with allies. It was “Buy American,” the old protectionist line.
MK: Well, we are out of space, so we might need to take that up next time. Speaking of cheap plastic toys from China, you better go replace your daughter’s lost balloon. I know where you can find one off the coast of South Carolina.
EA: Nah. The only surveillance technology I permit in my house is Alexa.
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