Balloon bickering over Biden’s actions, China’s intentions

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers on Sunday accused China of deliberately surveilling sensitive U.S. military sites with a suspected spy balloon and said the Biden administration had given Beijing an intelligence opening by not downing the balloon during its high-altitude drift through American airspace.

China, meanwhile, accused the U.S. of indiscriminate use of force when the American military shot down the balloon. Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said he lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy on Sunday over the “U.S. attack on a Chinese civilian unmanned airship by military force.”

The balloon’s presence in the sky above the United States before a military jet shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean with a missile Saturday further strained U.S.-China ties. America’s top diplomat abruptly scrapped a trip to Beijing and China’s defense ministry said in a statement after the balloon fell into the waters off the Carolina coast that it “reserves the right to take necessary measures to deal with similar situations.”

“Clearly this was an attempt by China to gather information, to defeat our command and control of our sensitive missile defense and nuclear weapon sites,” said the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, among the members of Congress on the Sunday news shows. “And that certainly is an urgency that this administration does not recognize.”

U.S. defense and military officials said the balloon entered the U.S. air defense zone north of the Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28 and moved largely over land across Alaska and then into Canadian airspace in the Northwest Territories on Monday. It crossed back into U.S. territory over northern Idaho on Tuesday, the day the White House said President Joe Biden was first briefed on it.

“It defies belief to suggest there was nowhere” between Alaska and the Carolinas where the U.S. could have safely shot down the balloon, said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the full Senate will get a briefing next week on the balloon, including details about its surveillance capabilities, and that the administration is considering measures against the Chinese for “their brazen activities.” He said the GOP criticism was political and premature, and that the U.S. had “sent a clear message to China that this is not acceptable.”

A senior administration official said other Chinese balloons transited the U.S. at least briefly on three different occasions during the Trump administration and once previously since Biden took office. The official said that the Trump balloon transits only became known after Trump left office and that intelligence agencies would offer briefings to former officials from the last administration on China’s global surveillance programs.

Biden issued the shootdown order but had wanted it to happen earlier, on Wednesday. He was advised that the best time for the operation would be when it was over water, U.S. officials said. Military officials determined that bringing down the balloon over land from an altitude of 60,000 feet would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.

“The message they (the Chinese) were trying to send is what they believe internally, and that is that the United States is a once great superpower that’s hollowed out, that’s in decline,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “And the message they’re trying to send the world is, ‘Look, these guys can’t even do anything about a balloon flying over U.S. airspace. How can you possibly count on them if something were to happen in the Indo-Pacific region?’”