Has the floaty-bag problem been solved?

The United States has been having “a bit of a floaty-bag problem over its airspace”, as South Africa’s Daily Maverick news-site put it.

Indeed it has. Four balloons or other flying “objects” shot down by the US Air Force over American or Canadian territory in eight days got everybody’s attention and made the already fragile state of US-Chinese relations a good deal worse. But it all turns out to be an innocent mistake. Sort of.

The first unknown flying object, a big Chinese balloon — 70 metres high, with an instrument payload the size of several buses — was obviously in the wrong place. It was clearly designed to gather “sigint” (signals intelligence), but flying it across the US, even 20km up, was just asking for trouble. Are the Chinese really that stupid?

No, they aren’t. Mumbled explanations to the Washington Post by embarrassed American officials who must remain nameless have now revealed that the US intelligence services saw the balloon launched from Hainan island off the southern Chinese coast in late January — and it was headed straight east for the US-owned island of Guam.

Guam is the major US air and naval base in the western Pacific, and an obvious target for a military reconnaissance balloon. National airspace only extends 12 nautical miles from a country’s coasts, so a steerable balloon could monitor all communications and other electronic emissions from an island like Guam without crossing the legal boundary.

The Chinese balloon had propellers and a rudder, so it was steerable within limits. China has actually sent balloons past Guam before, and the US didn’t complain, because it does the same sort of thing with its own reconnaissance aircraft, skimming along the edge of Chinese airspace. It’s all part of the Great Game.

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However, this time was different. On January 24, when the balloon was passing directly south of Japan, it veered north and began speeding up. Exceptionally cold air over northern China and Japan had drawn the high-altitude jet stream south, and it scooped up the balloon, also high in the stratosphere, and carried it north and east across the Pacific.

The winds were too strong for the Chinese balloon’s limited propulsion system to counter, so on January 28, it entered Alaskan airspace and continued east into Canada, where it was then blown south by more strong winds, entering US airspace again over Montana.

At this point, the Chinese also picked up a share of the blame, because when the now manageable wind took their balloon past the American missile fields in Montana, they stopped and hovered for a while to have a longer look and listen. Naughty, naughty.

The US authorities were initially reluctant to shoot the balloon down, because they knew the whole story. But they wouldn’t say what they knew, because that would reveal US surveillance capabilities, so the political pressure to “do something” grew. Finally President Joe Biden gave the shoot-down order — waiting until the balloon was safely over the Atlantic.

So it’s just a simple story of everyday superpower folk getting it wrong, and apologies are due all round. But the Chinese won’t elaborate on their original story that it was just an errant weather balloon, and the US won’t apologise at all. Like the four-year-olds they so often resemble, the Masters of the Universe find it almost impossible to make a real apology.

Meanwhile, what about the other three “objects” that were shot down? They were much smaller, and came in a variety of shapes and shades: “cylindrical, silver gray, with no sign of visible propulsion”; “a small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it”; “octagonal, with strings attached”.

They were shot down too, said John Kirby, the US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, “out of an abundance of caution”. But last week he had to go out on the White House stage again and confess that those three had probably been completely harmless. “Benign”, as he put it.

“These could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign,” he said. In fact, this was the “leading explanation” under consideration. The “entities” involved will face very serious legal problems if they are ever identified, but we can consider the “floaty-bag problem” to be solved.           

Was there any lasting damage? Yes, of course, there was.

These incidents have held the US media’s attention for more than a week. The details will quickly fade from the American public’s memory, but the impression will remain that somebody, and probably somebody Chinese, has been spying on them in their own homes.

This will not help in the task of calming the growing hostility between the world’s two greatest powers. — This is an additional article also from Gwynne Dyer.