Balloon spying grounds Beijing

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s unusually blunt “it must not happen again” warning to China’s top foreign policy official in a face-to-face meeting leaves no doubt about the depth of the crisis in relations caused by Beijing’s balloon espionage. His reprimand of CCP State Councillor Wang Yi in a hastily arranged hour-long encounter at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend could not have been more pointed or significant. Neither could it have provided a greater contrast to President Joe Biden’s relatively benign statement on the crisis last Friday AEDT, the tone of which was unsurprisingly categorised by The Wall Street Journal as “everything’s fine, nothing to worry about, go back to watching Netflix”.

Rightly, Mr Blinken made it clear that everything is far from fine. Addressing Mr Wang, he spoke of the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the coast of North Carolina on February 4 as an “unacceptable violation of US sovereignty and international law in US territorial airspace”. He underscored that “this irresponsible act must never happen again”.

Significantly, Mr Blinken reiterated forcefully to Mr Wang that Beijing’s balloon espionage program has “intruded into the airspace of over 40 countries across five continents (and) has been exposed to the world”. That is a disclosure that gives global context to the crisis, especially when it comes to close US allies such as Australia.

Mr Wang’s response to Mr Blinken was to demand the US “resolve the damage to the (bilateral) relationship caused by the indiscriminate use of force” in shooting down the Chinese spy balloon. Nothing better underlines the dissonance between the two sides in the face of brazen Chinese lawlessness similar to its disregard for the sovereignty of smaller nations in the Indo-Pacific. The world has grown accustomed to watching acts of shameless lawlessness and disregard for national sovereignty committed by China, mainly against smaller nations in the Indo-Pacific, but Beijing’s shameless display of international balloon espionage demands a resolute, unflinching response from Washington and its allies.

As Mr Biden said on Friday, no one wants a new Cold War with Beijing, but China’s egregious balloon spying that has now been exposed defies every tenet of the national sovereignty of nations. It is intolerable.

Mr Blinken laid down tough markers in his confrontation with Mr Wang in Munich. The Biden administration must be prepared to enforce them.