A salvage operation to recover China’s downed spy balloon sets the stage for a protracted diplomatic humiliation for the communist regime.
“They've caught China red-handed,” the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Cunningham told the Washington Examiner. “They have what they need to literally tell the world, ‘Look, we just caught China in a huge lie.’”
“The Chinese balloon over the United States confirms a pattern of Chinese behavior, where we see that China over the last years has invested heavily in new military capabilities, including different types of surveillance and intelligence platforms,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, in a joint press conference with Blinken. “We need to be aware of the constant risk of Chinese intelligence and then step up what we do to protect ourselves.
Mao and her colleagues maintain that the balloon was “used for meteorological and other scientific research” rather than intelligence gathering and that it was blown off course"due to the influence of westerly winds.” Those defenses have drawn a scornful response from American observers. “My best guess is that the foreign ministry was caught off guard when this happened, and this was the best they came up with in the heat of the moment and the need for responding quickly,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Mazza surmised. “I don't think we should be surprised at China's potential incompetence here. They're not really any more competent than we are. We can be pretty incompetent when it comes to this stuff.
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