Chinese Spy Balloon Pops Prospects for U.S.-China Rapprochement
The balloon incident reflects the emerging adversarial pathology of U.S.-China relations, which is increasingly obstructing any efforts at mutual understanding, and contributing to what many observers have already described as a new cold war.
So where does this leave U.S.-China relations? Substantially worse off than they were before the appearance of the balloon, which is unlikely to be a blip from which the relationship quickly recovers. An incident that probably reflected little if any strategic thinking on Beijing’s part (beyond routine intelligence operations) escalated very quickly into a diplomatic crisis and ultimately military action because of exaggerated fears and domestic politics on the U.S. side; bureaucratic fecklessness, lack of transparency, and diplomatic deception on the Chinese side; and strategic distrust and failure to communicate on both sides. It will be difficult and will take time to repair the damage to the point where both Washington and Beijing are prepared to go forward with Blinken’s trip—especially because both sides will probably have elevated the requirements for it to be politically defensible and diplomatically productive. And both sides will probably continue to overestimate their leverage and thus their ability to set the terms of engagement.
This turn of events is especially disturbing because nothing is more urgent and vital to salvaging U.S.-China relations than dialogue aimed at mutual understanding and developing the principles for managing the relationship that Biden and Xi talked about in November. This would be best achieved through some attempt at strategic empathy on both sides, but the rapid escalation of the balloon incident raises serious questions about whether the two sides are still capable of understanding and acknowledging each other’s perspectives, and whether their domestic politics would allow room for that to happen. In the meantime, another crisis could escalate quickly, given the volatility of the environment. Washington and Beijing need to find a way to defuse that possibility.
Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
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