What does it take to puncture a balloon?
Everyone knows just a prick, with a needle, pin, or any other sharp object.
But that-much seemed beyond those who advised President Joe Biden to use a sophisticated US Air Force fighter jet to burst a balloon over shallow American waters, only to send submarines to pick-up the blasted pieces.
Wordsmiths would use the adjective ‘Baloney’ or ‘Boloney’ to describe the ballooning episode of political comedy wrapped in serious military action.
It can’t be described as a tragicomedy because (thankfully) no one died.
But America didn’t look strong using a F-22 fighter jet and an air-to-air missile to prick a balloon China said was blowing with the wind and gathering weather patterns instead of military intelligence.
Many US balloon experts told CNN, BBC and other major US and European news networks that “hundreds” float around the world at any time of day – all doing different things, but none defiant of gravity and always prone to possibly being blown off-course.
What was so different about this balloon hovering 60,000 feet over the USA that caused Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to call-off a planned visit to Beijing, except that it had Chinese language ID registration markings?
The Pentagon and the White House both advised President Biden differently on how and when to blow-up the alleged ‘Spy in the Sky’ out of America’s airspace.
But it was all colored by the politics of the days leading to the President’s SOTU address on Tuesday, sounding more like spokespersons for America’s two major parties were going baloney (boloney) over the Chinese balloon, the global mainstream media following-suit with the narrative that it was a floating Chinese airship and an ‘eye in the sky’ for the Chinese military.
There was even speculation whether it was a “planned’, ‘accidental’ or ‘illegal Chinese incursion’ – all part of a hilarious but sorry display of how easy it is for politicians and media houses singing from the same hymn sheet to swing and sway global public opinion by playing on emotions to score political points in a race to virtually nowhere.
Coming in the middle of the heated battle in the US Congress just after the opposition Republicans took over the House of Representatives by the slightest margin and just ahead of the Democratic President’s second State of the Union (SOTU) address to launch his second-term bid, both sides typically saw the same thing differently: each viewed the balloon as a Chinese ‘threat’ to America’s security, but differed squarely on when it should have been shot down.
Republicans and Democrats both seized-up on the political harvest of a telescopic image of a distant object in the American sky shared online by a curious rural farmer in a Montana mountain, to suggest China was about to launch a space invasion, using the balloon spy-in-the-sky as advance pathfinder.
Thanks to the hyperactive responses of US media houses outdoing each-other to ramp-up the ballooning scare, everyone everywhere who didn’t know did get to see (on their screens) where ‘top secret’ US missile weapons bases are located.
Thanks too to Washington’s excessively-hyper overreaction, the improved ties that had been brokered between President Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit last year in Indonesia was broken, almost near to disrepair.
And, as to be expected, in the diplomatic fallout from Washington’s political saga, Beijing reserved ‘the right to do likewise in similar circumstances’ – and pointed-out that the ‘China visit’ Blinken so loudly postponed had only been announced in Washington.
While the Chinese balloon was kicked up-and-down both sides of the congressional aisle in The Capitol, the Reds and Blues didn’t seem to care how discolored America looked for using a missile to blast a balloon that could have been pricked with a nail.
Interestingly, if the White House and the Pentagon really believed what they say about the hi-tech and IT sophistry of China’s intelligence services, they would also have been sure that Beijing would not have been waiting for the balloon to return home to gather what the Americans claim it was gathering.
To ordinary Chinese citizens, it was another big show (of the type that Caribbean people would call a ‘pappy-show’) for a nation that says it’s always ready to fight China over Taiwan, not to know any other way to deflate a balloon than through military might.
However, one of the best lessons from this sorry episode in world affairs is the way all the heaped-up hype ended with the balloon blasted out of the sky and nothing to show from the pieces gathered, to confirm it was any threat to US National Security.
It was like cutting a tree down to see if it would have died if left to grow.
In the end, many of America’s closest allies in the balloon baloney (or boloney) were left with bloody noses.
As it turned out, all the war and spy talk did nothing to affect deepening trade ties between the USA and China.
Just as the political tension heightened between the world’s top two economies over the blasted balloon and after the US State Department announced it would pursue the company that owned it, official US data released Tuesday indicated US-China trade had reached a record high, rising to US $690.6 billion in 2022.
And if that was not enough, it was also announced two days later (Thursday this week) that while America’s eyes were fixed on the ‘Chinese eye-in-the-sky’ supposedly spying from above for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Chinese citizens’ eyes were fixed on a different part of their skies.
While the US was showing the world it was picking-up the pieces of the plastic balloon in shallow waters, the Chinese press were celebrating that two of their astronauts had “just completed the first leg of a six-part space-walk.”
Now, how’s that after all the blooming bacchanal of ballooning baloney?