A Chinese balloon flies over the United States and, immediately, in the two powers paint their faces and show their nails. The episode has extravagant flavors, and perhaps for that very reason it symbolizes in an extraordinary way the precariousness of the diplomacy of the time.
A finding that is aggravated against the background of the medieval war that a year ago Russia launched against Ukraine for no reason, a brutal but also extravagant fact.
It is difficult not to unite these two episodes to x-ray a period of enormous danger, although not only because of the clear rivalries between the two greatest planetary powers, but because of the lightness they expose.
Balloons like the ones that have filled the pages of the world’s newspapers in these hours, have always existed. Many of these devices They flew slowly over the United States during the Donald Trump administration or before without anyone apparently knowing or, more significantly, caring.
Washington has generally been more practical when it comes to observing what the rival is doing: it sends its military planes to fly over the limits of Chinese space, or its ships to sail off its coasts, an audacity that, for now, the People’s Republic not allowed with western power. His satellites would suffice.
The back room of this story the sainete certainly prowls. Even ufologists have appeared giving their opinion and the White House forced to clarify, amid smiles on the BBC in London, that it does not rule out an extraterrestrial presence, while accepting that no clues have been found for the moment about that alternative.
It happens that it is at least ridiculous Suppose China monitors secret US military installations by means of a gigantic and clearly visible object slowly passing through US airspace. So if it is not a Martian UFO, it is possible to assume that it was indeed a roving weather balloon, as the Chinese claimed.
The Pentagon immediately removed threat level the initial object of this saga, later shot down by the US air force. Along these lines, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an analysis body connected to the US intelligence community, assessed that “the most likely explanation is that it’s a weather balloon that got lost; Lost weather balloons are the basis for many UFO sightings.”
That reasoning has a limit. In such a case, China should have identified those responsible for the failure, have notified the US in time. and closed the dispute. It does not escape anyone that there is a political content in this crisis that goes beyond the certain caricatural character of it.
The simple appearance of this object has frozen the strategic rapprochement that had been taking place between the two powers. That movement, which was built above the enormous mutual distrust, It was less due to the need for a historical, permanent, and mature change in the binational bond than to the need to react to an explosive situation in the world economy.
dangerous competition
The US and China have been escalating their competition for planetary hegemony for years. This shock has been a drag on the dynamics of the accumulation system. The axis of the rivalry is the scientific vanguard, a territory in which Beijing shows significant progress.
What the West has sought, at best, is delay that evolution until something happens that can stop it. China has focused, in turn, on dodging with some success those obstacles behind its project of absolute autonomy.
But the global economic crisis interferes with those strategies and I would recommend a pause in the battle. According to the UN, based on data from international organizations, global growth it will slow down from the forecast 3% in 2022 to 1.9% in 2023. They are shrinking markets… for everyone.
That trend may be alleviated if the two greatest capitalist powers of the era reach some kind of coordination in line with the demand that the IMF and the World Bank had already raised since before the pandemic regarding the urgency of establishing limits to the rivalry of two extremely interconnected and mutually dependent structures.
To a large extent, that was Joe Biden’s mission and that is why Wall Street funded his campaign. But the North American president still circulates through the intricacies of the Cold War and China, for its part, dealt with feed all kinds of paranoia with the aggressive policies brought by the leadership of Xi Jinping and with the slamming of prudence that Deng Xiao Ping advised. levities.
The gloomy and uncertain situation forced Beijing, however, to accept a bunch of setbacks. Among them, he had to dismantle the zero Covid policy that strangled his economy and that he used as an internal control tool due to the social concern that was driving the drop in growth.
The effect, as is known, was even more explosive than the one sought to be contained by triggering an unprecedented multiplication of strikes and street protests. It was a particularly complex scene that questioned the executive quality of Xi’s management at times when he concentrated total decision-making power and turned his chair into a perpetual mandate.
A crucial part of those mutations has been the extensive three-hour meeting that Xi held with Biden in Bali, during the G20 summit. The result of that historic meeting, sought by both parties, was the replacement of veteran foreign minister Wang Yiin charge of the international policy of the Asian giant for the last nine years.
In his place, the Chinese ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, a diplomat respected by the top of North American power; specialized in Central Europe and with a previous mission in London.
The US, in turn, confirmed in that dialogue the trip to Beijing by the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, the first visit of that hierarchy in five years. To this handful of gestures, Beijing added the reluctance of the Chinese president to accept the insistent invitation of his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin for an official meeting in Moscow.
“The Chinese valued Blinken’s visit because they really want to work with the US to improve the relationship especially because Their priority is economic recovery.” illustrates Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center and a renowned expert on the foreign policy of the People’s Republic and on the link with Washington.
¿Internal China?
But the balloon appeared and all that delicate assembly dissolved. Blinken suspended his trip and the détente froze. Makes sense? It is valid to ask what this episode reveals about what really happens in the bowels of Chinese power.
As the aforementioned US Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, the balloon was surely meteorological, but not necessarily a naive player.
It is clear, it is also assumed for the Chinese nomenklatura, that if a mysterious device appears flying in full view over a state like Montana with missile bases and days after the Republicans, badly beaten in the midterm elections, appointed the new head of the Chamber of Deputies, there would be internal political pressure.
The episode was humiliating for the Democratic government. Biden had no other solution than a gesture of hardness and that’s why he knocked down the balloon, an order that he repeated later against any other foreign aircraft that appeared over his territory or that of Canada. Signals to disarm the opposition. China was able to foresee and anticipate it.
The conspiracy versions affirm that the device was moved mechanically towards the North American sky. And that it was flying suspiciously too low for the heights required for any meteorological exploration. There is no clarity about it, but the truth is that it achieved an immediate effect for complicate the rather public strategy of the Chinese president.
If this has been the case, it would explain the lack of empathy on the part of the People’s Republic, which seemed to react to the episode with the same surprise than her American counterpart blaming her for the incident and threatening reprisals.
Also denouncing the appearance of balloons here and there. A tactic against the inevitable fact of the cooling of the relationship that places the initiative to a certain extent on the side of the United States. But, in addition, to try to dissolve any suspicion of the existence of a challenge to the authority of the Chinese government flapping dangerously behind this soap opera.
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