Will Balloon War Between China and America Reach a Military Confrontation?

Mutual accusations between the United States and China regarding espionage balloons and violations of sovereignty raised fears that America will open a western front similar to what is happening in Russia, but this time against China, the first candidate to create a new pole in the world.

In February 2023, America and China began announcing the monitoring and shooting down of “unidentified objects” flying at high distances that carry out espionage. This sparked a new round of media war between the two superpowers in the world after hopes finally grew about the return of diplomacy to resolve their outstanding dispute.

 

Balloon Battle

The White House denied, on February 13, 2023, Chinese accusations of sending spy balloons over its territory.

Adrienne Watson, the White House National Security Council Spokesperson, said on Twitter: “Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false.”

She added: “It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the US and over 40 countries across 5 continents.”

The US official’s tweet came in response to the assertion of the Associated Press, quoting Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, that America is behind the flight of more than 10 high-altitude balloons in its airspace since January 2022 without obtaining legal permission from Beijing.

A day before, the US agency quoted the Chinese authorities as confirming that they were preparing to drop an unknown object that was flying at a high altitude near its eastern coast.

These Chinese announcements came after the United States and Canada monitored unidentified flying objects in the airspace of the two countries over a period of several days, which caused a sensation in the American political and media corridors.

US reports had spoken in early February of a Chinese balloon penetrating American airspace and arriving in Montana, northwest of the country. This sparked fierce criticism by Republicans of the Democratic Biden administration; they said it was an advanced Chinese espionage tool and a clear violation of American sovereignty.

On February 5, 2023, Biden went out to the media announcing that the US succeeded in shooting down the balloon.

He indicated that he had issued an order in early February to shoot down the balloon, but the Pentagon recommended an open area over the water.

For its part, Reuters quoted a senior US military official as saying that many combat aircraft participated in the projection mission, including an F-22, which carried out the mission with one AIM 9X missile.

The leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, revealed on February 12 that his country shot down two flying objects over the country’s airspace on February 10 and 11.

He explained that these objects were octagonal structures with strings and did not represent a military threat to anything on the ground.

But one of them was likely to pose a threat to civil aviation, as it flew at an altitude of 6,000 meters over Michigan in the northeast of the country, while the other was over Alaska in the far northwest of North America, he added.

On February 12, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, in a statement, that an “unidentified object” had been dropped over the northwest of his country, to be the fourth operation of its kind on the continent.

China, in turn, claimed on February 10 that the balloon that was shot down by America has nothing to do with espionage but is used for meteorology and scientific purposes and that it lost its way and entered US airspace by mistake.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed in a statement its regret over the flight of the balloon over America, stressing that it was “due to force majeure,” and accused politicians and the American media of exploiting the accident to discredit China, and at the same time considers that Blinken’s announcement of postponing his visit to Beijing “does not make sense.”

Before that, the semi-official Chinese newspaper, Global Times, quoted unnamed Chinese officials, on February 4, as saying that the American reaction is a fabricated noise, and these accusations are unfounded and unacceptable.

Balloons are among the oldest means of surveillance and espionage in the world, and the Japanese army used them for the first time to drop incendiary bombs over the United States during World War II (1939–1945).

It was also used extensively by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1947–1991).

Modern balloons often fly between 24 and 37 km above the ground and are significantly cheaper than other intercontinental espionage equipment.

 

Another Kind of Confrontation

In his reading of these allegations and mutual accusations, the researcher in international relations, Mohammed Abed, confirmed that the balloon war is an official escalation between America and China that reached a new level.

He told Al-Estiklal that “over recent years, America started a trade and diplomatic war against China unilaterally, then moved to escalate the military scene in the South China Sea by provoking Beijing in Taiwan, forming alliances with various countries in the region, and then tended to increase its military spending under the pretext of fear of the Chinese dragon.”

Beijing tried during that stage to stop the confrontation, according to Abed, and this gave it some time to search for economic alternatives, on the one hand, and to prove Washington’s “bad intentions” on the other hand.

However, the researcher added that this stage has ended, and the balloon war now is tantamount to raising the escalation to a new level.

“It is true that China has achieved some diplomatic breakthroughs, such as strengthening the alliance with the Solomon Islands, Cambodia, and Myanmar, but its options in trying to reassure neighboring countries have become limited, especially after the Philippines made its choice and returned to form a base for the US military presence in the region.”

He added: “Despite this, China remains calm and takes deliberate steps, and the United States is still the one that initiates the escalation.”

Abed explained this by saying: “Government intervention in the market and trade deals is unusual in America, where there is great reverence for the principles of supply and demand and market freedom, but security incidents are being exploited to justify government intervention and deny American companies benefit from the market, capital, or Chinese technology.”

This is what happened recently with Washington’s recent decision to ban dealings with several Chinese companies related to the aviation sector following the downing of the first balloon.

On February 10, the US Commerce Department decided to add six Chinese companies linked to the Chinese military’s aviation programs to its entity list, preventing them from acquiring US technology without government permission.

 

Message Sent

In light of this analysis, Beijing may be trying to send a signal to Washington, as the Chinese independent air-power analyst He Yuan Ming said.

He stated that, although China wants to improve relations, they are always ready to engage in confrontation by all necessary means without causing severe tension between the two countries.

“And what better tool for this than a seemingly innocuous balloon?” he told the BBC on February 3.

This is agreed with the expert on Chinese affairs, Benjamin Ho, by telling the BBC that China’s arsenal includes more advanced surveillance technology.

China has other means to spy on US infrastructure or to collect any information it wants to obtain, according to him.

This balloon aimed to send a message to the Americans, as well as to see how they would react, and perhaps China wanted the United States to discover the balloon.

It should be noted that China, despite the US economic and military provocations throughout 2022, avoided escalating tension with the United States in order to pass the fateful Communist Party congress at the end of October 2022, which ended with the election of President Xi for a third presidential term.

Professor of International Relations at Macalester College, Andrew Latham, pointed out that China is currently trying to strengthen its economy after officially ending the Coronavirus pandemic and is also trying to strengthen its army to protect Taiwan.

He explained that this increases the intensity of the competition between the two largest countries in the world, but nevertheless, Latham confirmed, in a television interview to the Emirati Al-Ghad channel on February 5, that it is not expected that the matter will reach the point of military confrontation at the present time.