Joe Biden will speak with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, about the incident of the "spy balloon" that, launched by Beijing, invaded the airspace of the United States and crossed its territory until a fighter of the Air Force of the country shot it down on 4 February off the coast of South Carolina. This was announced by the US leader in his first and expected appearance after the shooting down of the Chinese device and three other unidentified objects. Biden asserted that he does not seek "a cold war" between his nation and China, but that he "will not apologize" for ordering the shooting down of his balloon.
The US president corroborated the latest information from his team in the sense that the other three aircraft shot down in Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron last weekend are not related to the Chinese aerostat and were probably harmless: " Nothing at this time suggests they were related," he said, "or that they were surveillance vehicles from some other country." The assessment of the Washington Intelligence services is rather that "these three objects were probably balloons linked to companies, recreational or research institutions that studied the climate or carried out other scientific investigations."
Biden announced the development of "stricter rules" to track, monitor and potentially shoot down unknown aerial objects" after the disputed decisions taken against the gadgets that appeared in recent days.
Before his appearance, the president had ordered White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to train and lead a Biden added dramatically: “Make no mistake: if any object poses a threat to the security of the American people I'll take it down."
The balloon crisis began when, on February 2, the Pentagon warned of the detection of a large balloon that had been invading the country's airspace since January 28, the day it had entered through the Aleutian Islands, in Alaska. Biden proposed its immediate downing as soon as it became known that it had flown over an area of Montana near Malstrom Air Force Base, which is home to one of the country's nuclear missile silos. But the Pentagon advised against the operation because of the risk it posed to people on the ground and because it would be better to wait for the balloon to reach the Atlantic because that would make it easier to recover and study its parts.
Beijing immediately assumed that the balloon was its own, but assured that it was not a spying device but a meteorological observation device. Washington has always rejected and continues to reject this version.
An F-22 fighter shot down the balloon 11 miles off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, February 4, amid bipartisan criticism for the delay in doing so. Although the Department of Defense assured that measures had been taken to protect military infrastructure from any attempt to capture images or signals, Republicans and Democrats disagreed with the strategy, considering that the Chinese military could have obtained sensitive information.
Between the following Thursday and Sunday, three more unidentified flying objects were detected and immediately shot down, also with air-to-air missiles, over the skies over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron in Michigan.
While the work to recover the remains of the Chinese balloon continued its course and yielded interesting findings, including "signal-capture antennas and sensors", the troops deployed to the points where the other three elements would have fallen found nothing. Or at least nothing of military interest, since on Tuesday the National Security spokesman almost ruled out that these other gadgets belonged to the Chinese "extensive espionage program" that, deployed in more than 40 countries on five continents, would have included the first and big downed balloon.
The Government also confessed that if it located the last three and "small" artifacts, it was because, following the appearance of the Chinese balloon, the Pentagon had recalibrated its radars to capture smaller and low-speed objects. His earlier argument that the three aircraft represented a danger to civil aviation no longer convinced. And the last three balloons punctured.
Now it remains to deflate the bilateral conflict, somewhat inflamed as a result of the crisis. It seems that Biden has gotten to it.
