Plain English with Derek Thompson - China’s Spy Balloon Is Down. Cold War 2.0 Risks Are Rising.

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

If we’re being honest, the whole thing is kind of funny. A Chinese spy balloon floated across the U.S. Nobody died, unless we count the balloon itself. In a saner age, this story would be over. But balloongate offers a useful hook to evaluate the relationship between the U.S. and China during a period of extraordinarily high tensions. These are the most powerful countries in the world, the two largest economies in the history of the world, and they are currently undergoing a kind of conscious uncoupling that is having a huge effect on our economies, politics, and planet. Juliette Kayyem is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and former government official. James Palmer is the deputy editor at Foreign Policy. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Juliette Kayyem & James Palmer  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Follow the show now on Spotify. And do us a favor. Give us five stars. And do us another favor and stay major. Today, we're doing it. We're talking about the Chinese spy balloon. So here's a little TikTok to get us started. On Saturday, two Saturdays ago, January 28th, a spy balloon made in China, solar-powered

and carrying surveillance equipment about the size of several school buses, began a controlled and deliberate drift into U.S. territory, first entering Alaskan airspace. The next day, it drifted over Canada and headed south. On Tuesday, it crossed the U.S. Canadian border into Idaho. On Wednesday, it passed into Montana, near a U.S. Air Force base with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and that's when the shouting began.

civilians noticed a big white blob floating across the U.S. China said it was just collecting meteorological data. American security officials called bullshit. Cable news ran 48 consecutive hours of a white orb floating in a blue sky, which is not compelling footage, by the way, unless it is accompanied by the felicitous phrase, Chinese spy balloon. Some politicians, including many notable Republicans, insisted that we shoot the thing out of the sky. The White House rejected those suggestions and instead waited for the thing to drift across the U.S.

for the next two days. On Saturday afternoon, this past weekend, several F-22s took down the balloon with a sidewinder missile off the Carolina coast, where its remains are now being harvested for analysis. So, we're talking about this, I think, for two reasons. The first is that if we're being honest, the whole thing is kind of funny.

Nobody is dead except the balloon. But it also offers a useful hook to evaluate the relationship between the U.S. and China, the two most powerful countries in the world, the two largest economies in the history of the world, two countries that are undergoing a kind of conscious uncoupling at the moment that will have a huge effect on geopolitics and global economics. So we have two guests today. First, Julieta Kayam is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, former assistant secretary for intergovernmental Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, and she is on this show to talk about

the homeland. For the geopolitical angle, we've got James Palmer, deputy editor at Foreign Policy and the author of the FP's China Brief Newsletter. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Juliet Kayam, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. And James Palmer, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Juliet, let's start with you. The U.S. us in China spy on each other all the time. We have been spying on each other for decades. We look at them with satellites. They look at us with satellites. What makes this story different? Yeah. So the story is different for two reasons. One is that the use of a balloon has a specific surveillance purpose because balloons, when they are under operational control of the spying country,

and hover. And that hovering allows for greater detail, understanding of, say, atmospheric releases. So if you're over a nuclear facility, things that you and I would think, why would anyone want to know? But a foreign country may want to know. The second reason besides the hovering is they, of course, got caught. So we've now learned that this has happened before three times, at least in the Trump administration. But the getting caught only occurred when the balloon was in what we would call Norah. space. So that's the space that governs the U.S. and the Northern Command and is pre-space altitude. So it would be both commercial flights. So if a commercial flight had a hostage-taking situation, and the space between that and what is called, you know, international space,

where satellites are allowed to do essentially whatever they want, right? So the Chinese satellites are going round and around. So that's essentially the difference and the answer to the to the why would they have done this, or what benefit the weather they intended it. I leave to China, US experts, but this is the why. James, I was reading some of your great work, and you wrote that this is not the first time that geopolitical adversaries in an alleged Cold War

have spied on each other, wherein one party gets caught and lies about trying to collect weather information. Isn't that right? Yeah. Exactly. The most famous incident, of course, is the 1960 U-2 shootdown when the U-S. was running overflights in planes that it believed were way beyond Soviet capabilities to tackle. One of these got shut down, and the U.S. promptly came up with an incredibly elaborate lie. It claimed that it was a weather maintenance plane being run by NASA.

They painted an entire play, another U-2 in different colors. They came up with all this background. The problem was that all this time, the Soviets had also captured the pilot, but they deliberately didn't give out that they had captured the pilot. And so they were able to suddenly stringless and reveal that everything the U.S. had said was a lie. And it was a deeply embarrassing incident and also one that blew up of a promising set of talks that were kind of about to happen in the context of relative detente between the U.S. and Soviet Union at the time.

But even before that, the US tried to make great use of balloons during the Cold War, the early Cold War before satellites were really developed. Project Moby Dick in 1957 involved hundreds of balloons that were floated over the Soviet Union, obviously that couldn't be controlled at the time. But they had pre-prepared weather balloon excuses, and in fact they contained a little thing saying this, you know, this is part of a weather. monitoring program if it brought down, please return to X, X, X, X.S. So both the spying and the excuses have been part of, you know, these sort of great power relations for a long time.

Can you quickly gloss over James, why a balloon? Like, when at first, I have to imagine, like, if we're all being honest, a part of what makes this story catchy is the fact that Chinese spy balloon is like kind of a funny phrase. Like, it's just, it's a little bit ridiculous. Like maybe we are in Cold War II. Maybe this is going to kick off a geopolitical disaster. But if we're honest with ourselves, Chinese spy balloon is like kind of funny. Why have not only the Chinese but also the US, you're saying, going back to the 1950s, maybe even earlier, why are we even playing around with balloon technology as a surveillance tool?

So in the 1950s, it was just that we didn't have satellites. And so anything we could get over the Soviet Union was useful. And in fact, we got quite a bit of information. I believe at least one major Soviet nuclear site was detected via the balloons. Now, the question is, why do it in an area of, you know, the eye in the sky, when you can pick out a fly on the back of a farmer in Siberia from thousands of miles up? And basically, it seems to be a question of costs. So in theory, if you could get a decent balloon network,

and I love saying those words, you could get a decent balloon network going in so much. You can hear my wife laughing in the background. Yeah, because decent balloon network sounds like some rejected alt-rock band from high school, yeah. Exactly. It's a lovely phrase. And I do think we should remember that these are not, like, little balloons.

Like, this was a, this was a 200-foot high balloon carrying a payload the size of a jetline. This thing was massive. And, you know, if you sort of think of it in terms of, like, unmanned airship, it feels a little bit more serious than balloon. But balloon is a lovely word, and I think we're going to say it many times over the course of this podcast. So if you can get this network kind of going, in theory you have something that's cheaper and easier to maintain than satellites, because you don't have the massive launch costs of getting them into space.

Also, balloons, as we mentioned earlier, can potentially loiter. That is, they can – satellites, of course, are going round and round, and so you're getting stuff on a very predictable kind of time frame. But a balloon can stay in place and keep over one side, keep picking up information. So in theory, there's a real usage here. The Pentagon has actually been researching surveillance balloons itself again since at least, I think, 2019. And they spent about 4 million on them, at least that we know about. One of the other big changes of the late 2010s was that machine learning technology developed

by Google originally made it possible for balloons to effectively stick. themselves using the wind in a much more purposeful way than just throwing them up in the air and seeing where they went. This is pretty wild. So I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic, maybe five, five and a half years ago about this weird little project coming out of Google's R&D Lab called Loon. And Loon was their effort to build a decent balloon network that could provide internet coverage for places in the world that couldn't build their own terrestrial internet.

And it was exactly what you mentioned. If they could use machine learning technology to figure out which cross currents, thousands and thousands of feet in the air, 80,000, 90,000 feet in the air, which cross currents were blowing which way, they could essentially use the cross currents kind of like highways and navigate down a certain cross currents in order to move toward the rural area. They want to provide coverage to, then elevate the balloon in order to float it back to some other area to extend network coverage in that direction. So it is this, there is sort of this confluence of private and public balloon technology for both covering an area, an area for Internet, but also surveilling an area for a state. Juliet, this gets us back to you. Republicans have spent a lot of the last week saying that we should have just shot the balloon down. I even saw several relatively prominent conservative media personalities say, you know, it's just a balloon. Why can't we just pop it your response? Well, it is, as James were saying, it is not just a balloon. The size of the balloon itself was huge, but the amount of, you know, and basically the cargo

hold of the balloon, the balloon had things attached to it. The balloon was just the means of transportation. That was an airplane, right? And so are you going to volunteer, are you going to shoot down an airplane over even not populous states? This was my favorite part of the republicans. Well, Montana's not that crowded. I was like, okay, there's also wind current,

so you don't know where this material is going to go. If you, honestly, if you look at just where it is in the ocean, I think that there's a eight to ten mile. I read a seven mile diameter. Seven miles, seven mile diameter. So just think about what that would have, you know, if you were over people, it's not like, oh, we can land it, we can land all the debris on,

you know, in Yellowstone or something. So, so the, the Republican, notion of operational risk calculation was based solely on the politics. And that's going to go on for a while and sort of not worth it. Because what we now know is, right, the mission, the

bring it down order from Biden came Wednesday. The military either advises him or pushes back on him saying we're not going to do this. This is the head of NORAD. We are not going to do this because we know what happens to debris in air. We're not going to risk. civilian life, and this is, you know, what I wrote about, like, there's a difference between

a national security tool and a homeland security tool. Why? Because the burden falls on U.S. citizens who may have an expectation of not being killed by NORAD. And what is self-owned, right? I mean, can you imagine the Chinese have this balloon out there and we're like in a killer, like, you know, put at risk our own citizens because Twitter wasn't happy. We knew that it would be over water. I think the general senses China had lost some capacity to move the thing, that it would be over water within two days. It is. You shoot it. It's actually landed in really shallow rodders. And what I want to remind people, it wasn't like those days were lost. You know, we, we, God, what is it? The scent was launched. I wrote down my notes, but now

let me find the scent, the combat scent. I want to make sure I got this right, was sent, was And this is just a loitering airplane. It's taking pictures of this thing from above, from below. We're getting so many pictures of this thing as it's operational. It then is coming over. We're also taking measurements. Those measurements are going to be relevant. What is, you know, what frequencies?

What is it emanating? People were saying, oh, it could have bio-weapons, whatever. I mean, and then it comes over the ocean, right? Then it gets shot down. And now the cleanup is a relatively easy cleanup. They were monitoring. People I talked to on Saturday, they are monitoring, of course, by radar as it comes down. They have a good sense of where things are.

They know where the balloon is. They know exactly where the balloon is. They do anticipate some debris coming on shore. So how the Chinese did this is now ours, right? And that is an intelligence victory. If you are in China in the head of their equivalent of the CIA, you are not happy today. let alone the leadership. There's, there's, you know, why they did this as a bigger conversation or did they even know,

did they, did they intend to do this? But that's exactly why these three days of patients were not just waiting. There was a lot going on in terms of what, what we were learning. And meanwhile, you know, the Chinese are bending over backwards to come up with a plausible deniability because they know that they've been gone. Right. The Chinese have expressed, I think what they said, profound dissatisfaction. that we destroyed their equipment.

Was there a case against blowing up the balloon? Was there a case to say, you know what, we caught your satellite style equipment, we caught your surveillance equipment, right? The equivalent of a satellite, but 10,000 feet over land rather than miles and miles. Was there a case to just say, we're just going to let it go?

Oh, no, no, no, no. I mean, once it, once, I mean, the Chinese, that's what the Chinese are arguing, But from our perspective, this would be the equivalent of the Chinese sent tanks onto homeland soil. So we're just, we're going to, we have rules. They have rules. They have the same rules, which is, right? The aerial space is above our homeland is the same as if you brought you, you sent tanks.

I mean, just think of a weaponized drone, right? Simply because it wasn't a direct threat to the U.S. It was maybe long term a threat because of its surveillance capacity. And that's what, you know, I think that was the challenge for the Biden administration. It was true, one has to believe it's true. This was not an immediate threat to U.S. citizens or to military or aviation capabilities, but it could not stay, right? I mean, you just, so you're just figuring out what, what hour am I going to,

am I going to make those two things work? I have one more question, Juliet, for you, about the homeland security aspects of this. Before we go back to James, about the geopolitics, in your time with the Obama administration, Did you ever face anything like this that you can talk about? No, no, no, no. And all of them in the public, I was thinking about this. You know, we had our aviation threat. So think about the Christmas attempted bombing in which you know, you're aware of an aviation threat.

Can you take a half step back and tell us about that? Oh, sorry. That was the case in which that was the underwear bomber case in which, in which other airline passengers basically got hold of this guy. He's trying to light stuff in his underwear to blow up the plane. This happened on Christmas Day,

and now my years are melding together, but I think it was 2009. And then, and so you get whatever you need to do on the aviation side. On the maritime side, I am much more used to this simply because of things, like you could think about this as this is like an oil spill. You're going to protect the aviation.

You're going to protect the aviation space, which they're doing. You're going to get community, state, and locals ready to find the oil, so to speak, or to find the debris. So that was a key message of NORAD the last couple of days was, if you see a wire, do not touch it, right? They call us. And then the third piece is, of course, the maritime retrieval, which is, as I said, going to be relatively easy.

It's being run out of the Navy is sort of what you would call the incident command in this stage. And we're sending out both unmanned capacity. Think of like, you know, just like little clippers that are picking up stuff and then scuba divers and al. But this is what people train for.

And it's not that the pickup is not that unique. It's just obviously what we're picking up. I don't remember anything classified or unclassified in this regard. James, it's possible that the most significant thing that comes out of this isn't the balloon or what we recover from the payload under the balloon, but what happens in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China in the aftermath. So U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has postponed a critical diplomatic visit to Beijing that was scheduled for last weekend.

I want to take a step back and offer some context here. The relationship between the U.S. and China has been deteriorating for years. what happened to this relationship in the last few years that has brought us to the beginning of what some people are thinking of as a second Cold War? So to some degree, it was a kind of elastic band effect. For a long time, U.S. policy towards China

was very accommodationist, and it was very much geared towards the idea that China was going to change. Things were going to get more like America. It was going to be this kind of natural effect whereby everybody was going to watch, you know, two and a half men and sex in the city, and then they were going to become good democratic citizens. And I'm slightly making fun of that, but that was, to some degree, working.

The Chinese public was becoming more friendly to the US. It was demanding more. Culturally, the US was kind of on the ascendant in China in a way that I think a lot of people missed. Now, starting from 2013, you saw a significant, like, crackdown in China on cultural content, on freedom speech, which was already pretty bad, but became a lot worse on online content. So you have this kind of domestic push against the US. That got mixed with increasing aggression beyond China's borders, particularly at sea in the South China Sea, and with a bunch of spying on the United States. and with a bunch of spying on the United States and spying in ways that were particularly aggressive.

And I think for a big part of the American kind of security intelligence establishment, the final straw was the US and China signed a big agreement, basically on cybersecurity. And then the Chinese conducted even bigger hacks, including the OPM hack, which basically got personal information of pretty much every serving U.S. officer. So then Trump came along, and Trump was much more ambiguous on China himself than people, I think, realized. He was often, in fact, pushing for kind of reconciliation with Xi behind closed doors.

He was canceling measures against Chinese companies like ZTE because he had promised Xi. Trump really had, has no principles, basically. So he was very much a kind of being blown both ways here, like the balloon. And he would, you know, Steve Bannon would be telling him that the Chinese were, you know, the great evil of the world. And then Steve Wynn would be telling him that he needed to do business with them and, you know, to keep the casinos open in Macau. And then I assume Trump would probably get confused about which Steve was which,

and it would be a whole process. But there was a very hardcore group within the Trump administration, led by Matt Pottinger that really pushed hard to go more hawkish on China. And they kind of picked up the prevailing wind in D.C., which at the same time, D.C. was getting very excited about the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, this big kind of geopolitical push that was called a Chinese Marshall Plan, all these kind of things. And they were getting very excited about Made in China 2025, 23, I forget,

which was this kind of plan to move up the value chain. And they saw this as signs that China, which is true, had geopolitical ambitions to overtake the United States. These were very clearly being put into play. Now, the irony of this was that all this came in true sort of think tank, D.C. Hill fashion, a couple of years after these big projects had mostly failed, the BRI has mostly not been good for China. The Made in China program has not bought sort of semiconductor manufacturing home or anything like this. but it provided a real spur to push this forward. Then comes the pandemic, and the pandemic pretty much crashes everything.

It crashes people-to-people relations between the two countries, because nobody is going on trips to the other countries. So everything from students to tourists to the sort of track two diplomacy that normally kind of provides some oil on the wheels of great power diplomacy. and the two sides start exchanging conspiracy theories. China very rapidly tries to cover up the fact that the pandemic originated in China, probably from very, very bad Chinese agricultural practices that they were supposed to have changed after the first SARS outbreak.

By coming up with a whole conspiracy theory that it started in the US, with Fort Dietrich, all this, that it was done by like secret US military experiments, the US comes up with a whole range of conspiracy theories ranging from the mildly plausible to the lunatic and China reacts very aggressively to any country that calls for an investigation in the origins of COVID, like Australia being the most prominent example. And because this kind of contingent of xenophobes and hawks has risen within China, Chinese diplomacy in a system where everybody is kind of working towards the furor.

They're all trying to do what they think Xi Jinping wants, basically turns them into a bunch of dicks. So you have all this stuff, and this has a big impact on the way that the US officials see the Chinese, the fact that you're getting these basically online trolls who are the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the US ambassador, the Chinese ambassador to Brazil, or the consulate in Ireland,

are doing this stuff that is really nasty and vicious. And that is almost the final straw. So it's not just, so US-China relations collapse and perceptions of China around the world collapsed too. Like China is more unpopular than it's ever been, particularly amongst neighbors. The country with the single highest anti-China kind of poll ratings in the world is South Korea.

The South Koreans now dislike the Chinese more than they dislike the Japanese. That's really hard. That's a remarkably comprehensive story, and I really appreciate you naming all those different elements that have soured relations, both materially and attitudinally. I think it's important that you put emphasis on both of that. It's important, I think, for our full understanding of the situation, to note that China has tried to execute, it seems to me,

a bit of a pivot in regard to its relations with the U.S., and that this meeting between the Chinese and Secretary Lincoln might have been a really important piece of that pivot. James, do you want to pick up the story from there? So, yeah, since last fall or so, we've seen an effort by the Chinese side to dial down the aggressive diplomacy, to reach out to the U.S. They've become much milder in their tone behind closed doors. We saw the Xi Biden meeting last, I forget when it was October, I think, which was pretty, friendly. You know, they were, I mean, you know, Biden is very good at glad-handing people in all kinds of ways. And that worked, that seems to have worked with Xi. You didn't get any of the kind of aggressive

posing or fierce body language. You had two, you know, two people getting along. And there there seemed to be this real effort to kind of, you know, take things back a notch. And I think that was coming from two impulses. One was the realization by some on the Chinese side that there was a real danger of major conflict here, perhaps even war. And nobody wants that. So they and the Biden administration share an interest in putting a flaw on U.S.-China relations and saying, it can get this bad, but it can't get worse. The economic aspect was also really important, though, because the U.S. has been trying very hard to snip ties between U.S. businesses and China, particularly in tech. And while there's still a lot to be done, and while it's, you know,

The US is a country under the rule of law. The US can't just tell countries, tell companies to stop doing business in China for the most part. They can challenge it. They can push back. There's been lots of that. It posed a real challenge to China. China is still very dependent upon the US markets and upon supply of things like semiconductors from the US, from Taiwan and so on, they've been trying to bring into China, but haven't had much luck with.

on top of that they clearly got some pretty bad economic news that winter like the chinese GDP either grew by very little or possibly even shrunk last year at a time when everybody else did surprisingly well this caused the big reversal in zero COVID policy in December and and they're clearly trying to push to get the economy moving again and having semi-decent relations with the US is part of that juliet back to you joe Biden is delivering the state of the union address this week. Yeah. Already in that address I've come to read are all sorts of passages about what essentially

amounts to an industrial policy of America First manufacturing. That is an economic story that absolutely clicks in to what James just talked about, that there is an economic decoupling already underway between the U.S. and China and China floating surveillance balloons over Montana and over potential nuclear sites in Montana is not going to make us want to recouple at all. So taking that, what else do you expect Joe Biden to do with Balloon Gate? In this moment he has when, I mean, he's got this opportunity to have maybe his highest rated appearance before the American people all year.

This is not a guy who gives a lot of prime time speeches. What do you think he's going to do with this gate? So this gate falls into, I think, a sort of consistent narrative by the administration of which Afghanistan is actually a major counter. I mean, in other words, if you just look at their strategy, everything from China to everywhere, which is what I wrote about,

what I called just extending the runway, which is all of these things are going to be potential conflicts. If we can just sort of delay the hot moments, right? Because this could have been a hot moment, right? The Chinese balloon falls on U.S. soil and kills people. Those are victories. And so this seems to me consistent with the sort of, you know, the sort of like we're just going to respond and not actually think through the consequences.

It also, I think, is a narrative that's consistent with, you know, the sort of mature is a nice way to put it. Some people may say too mature for Biden, but this sort of nothing is new. I've been around the block. This was just a little blip. This isn't going to be a footnote. you know, at the, when the story is written about this new Cold War. And he might be right about that, actually. I mean, you know, he's given all the other things that we're going to be fighting about.

So I would expect him to, in his conversations about China and say, you know, when there is an incursion on homeland space, we think clearly. I think the narrative and look at the long view. I think the narrative that Biden also has in his favor is you cannot fight. find a single person in the Pentagon to counter the recommendation that was given to him by the Joint Cheese, which is just wait, two days from North. I mean, it's not like one of those things where Afghanistan were like the second we withdraw, you hear 20 guys from the Pentagon saying, we told him not to do this. We told him not to do this. So I think that that's going to be, I think, part of an overall narrative that he may, that he'll get into on the China side.

I don't think he's going to get into it on the homeland side because remember people, remember state of the unions are divided into two parts. We're always great at home and we are always great abroad. But the at home part, I think on the homeland front is going to, you know, he's going to have to just address the border issue. I would love to just pick up on one thing that Jane said about China's struggles. As I was, you know, talking to you, Derek,

about sort of what I feel comfortable talking about and not, because I think it's good to stay in lanes. I do want to note that the challenges that China had with its COVID policy, which I'm very familiar with in terms of threats, came to a head, if you just look at the calendar, during the World Cup. It was then that the Chinese watching teams play, seeing every other country in the world parting it up, unmassed, that those first protests started.

And sports have always had a lot of influence on foreign relations and foreign policy. That image of a world parting, so to speak, playing and partying. And what has happened to China is an image that the Chinese are going to have to figure out in the years to come. But I think it is telling that it was, in fact, the World Cup

and this idea that China had was too isolated that has now been pushing China towards a greater, a greater sort of floor setting, as James was describing. Yeah, I myself am ambivalent on whether or not this is an inflection point where things get worse, where this is like some kind of Sputnik moment that accelerates a Cold War. I'm not equating the achievement of, you know,

sending a satellite in a space for the first time with floating a balloon over the U.S. for the one millionth time, But there's that fear that it's an inflection point for the worst, like 1957 between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It could also theoretically, this year could theoretically mark an inflection point for the better. We might be at a local men in terms of our relations between the U.S. and China, that things got so bad with COVID-Zero. The effect of watching the World Cup was so powerful on people in, for example, Shanghai that they said we can't live under these conditions anymore. As James, you just said, they just got this economic reading. Who knows how honest the public reading of it,

what the world knows of it is. They might have gotten economic reading that says a country that we expect to grow 5% a year, just shrunk by 0.5% in the last quarter. That's catastrophic. We can't have this anymore. We have to think about a recoupling strategy that brings in the United States.

You put all this together, and maybe it's an inflection point for the better. Julia, you can pick up on that, and then James, I'll go to you. In this moment, going to be a chapter, the balloon, is it a paragraph? Is it a footnote? Remember, the incentives are really interesting for both countries. The Chinese want to forget it. This is, I mean, in the long haul, this is such an embarrassment for them because they either lost operational

capacity. We now have their gear. We now know what they can do. You know, the idea that this was, you know, they infiltrated our airspace without impunity. None of that makes sense to me. This is an embarrassment to them. And we want to keep it close. it because we now have their stuff and we're not going to advertise what we found out. So the incentives are for both parties to treat this like a footnote. There is a select committee on China right now in Washington. And I do wonder whether that select committee might be comprised of people that are interested in advancing an economic agenda of industrial policy, right, that makes the U.S. more committed to, for example, manufacturing advanced semiconductors right here within our borders.

that might use this as or dramatize this moment for the purpose of achieving an objective that isn't even military base at all. It's more economic. James, I wonder what you see as some of the potential domino effects here. You know, I saw some people saying, if China is going to claim, probably falsely,

that this was a balloon for collecting climate science research against the interests of the parties that they are spying on, that it could make it more difficult for it to collaborate with China in terms of international climate policy, are there other dominoes that we're not, yeah, I see, I see you shrugging there. Let me set up the question in a different way, because I don't even know if that's a very compelling entry. What are the most interesting dominoes to think of coming out of this event? So I think it depends on what happened with the balloon in the first place.

And there's two possibilities there on the Chinese side. The overwhelming, I would say, likelihood, the 80% likelihood is that it was a mistake. is that they had a system that was designed to be run probably offshore, not to cross into the continental United States, and that something went wrong, they lost control of it, possibly the polar vortex had some kind of effect. And so this was basically a screw-up. And a scrub in a program that might not even have been a good idea in the first place.

You know, China is just as capable of big and stupid and wasteful programs as the United States, perhaps even more so, the Chinese military is pretty messy, pretty corrupt, and not always incomplete, not always talking to each other. So if it was a screw-up, then the overwhelming interest is to stop talking about it. And I think that that's what they're trying to do. I think they put out a kind of pro forma protest because China is incapable of,

accepting any kind of blame on the world stage. They haven't talked about it in domestic media. Well, I think they've mentioned in a couple of newspaper articles. It hasn't been on the TV news at all. They've really been playing it down. They're not trying to make a big deal out of this. And normally they love to make a big deal out of things. So I think that they're just going to try and shove it to the side,

that the blink and trip probably goes ahead in, you know, two to six weeks anyway. And everybody just sort of quietly forgets it, except that it becomes part of the litany of complaints by the hawkish lobby in D.C. Now, there is a chance that this was deliberate and that it was an attempt by basically hardliners, anti-U.S. hardliners to screw up the blinking trip.

I don't think that's very likely, but it's faintly possible. And if that was the case, I think, it's possible that they tried that and basically got squashed internally for it, that they set the balloon over as a deliberate provocation, but now the probably majority faction, which wants at least some reconciliation for economic purposes,

basically sat on them at home, and we're not going to get anything more out of that. And as with so much in China, we really can't know well. We're doing sort of guesswork and cremelineology to try and determine these things. So we're really just going by probabilities. But most of the time it's cock up rather than conspiracy. Yeah.

Juliet, last question of you. Cock up, conspiracy. Where do you fall on that spectrum? I cannot imagine under any scenario that they would have done something this aggressive in our homeland that was so clumsy, made them look like idiots, seemed very 18th century. I mean, if you're going to do something aggressive in the homeland, like, come on, you like, you know, get me worried.

I was never worried. This seemed to me to be a mistake. Maybe there's some internal debates in China that would suggest why it is, but why it happened. But this is, we, we, as I was saying earlier, the conflict, in quotes, with China is generational at this stage. There are going to be moments where it is not at all clear

that there is a resolution that ends up on the ocean floor with no one wanting to talk about it. Let's take these when we can. And not trot around. I mean, this is my general sense. Let's save our bandwidth for another time. Juliet, James, thank you so, so much. Thank you.

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