President Xi wouldn’t have invested so much of his personal reputation into advancing the shared goal of a New Detente through his meetings with Biden and other Western leaders during last November’s G20 Summit, not to mention the active engagements between their diplomats since then, had he not truly wanted to make progress on this.
I'm not an expert in balloons but it seems to me that there is a distinct possibility that they simply lost control of it. The people who launch and steer these balloons control their direction by changing their altitude to take advantage of air currents that move in different directions at different altitudes. You would think that if they were conducting a clandestine spying mission they would have put it well above 55,000 ft which would have made it less detectable and observable. The neo cons and hard liners seem always to be looking for a molehill to blow into a mountain. Perhaps Occams Razor could be applied to this incident...Something went wrong!!
This “New Detente” to which you increasing refer connotes a measure of amicability, even collusion, between the US and China - ostensibly designed to retain their allegedly existing global duopoly - when the evidence rather suggests an attempt by the two countries to establish a modus vivendi that primarily preempts military confrontation ...an attempt, if there is/was one, which was deliberately stymied by the American announcement of four new bases on the Philippines just days before the balloon incident. The balloon could just as easily have been a Chinese show of strength authorised by Xi to establish the parameters of that modus vivendi.
It is also preleminary to anticipate that there are a "hardliner faction" in China that was behind the balloon incident. It is only a guess, but not without logic.
I'm not an expert in balloons but it seems to me that there is a distinct possibility that they simply lost control of it. The people who launch and steer these balloons control their direction by changing their altitude to take advantage of air currents that move in different directions at different altitudes. You would think that if they were conducting a clandestine spying mission they would have put it well above 55,000 ft which would have made it less detectable and observable. The neo cons and hard liners seem always to be looking for a molehill to blow into a mountain. Perhaps Occams Razor could be applied to this incident...Something went wrong!!
This “New Detente” to which you increasing refer connotes a measure of amicability, even collusion, between the US and China - ostensibly designed to retain their allegedly existing global duopoly - when the evidence rather suggests an attempt by the two countries to establish a modus vivendi that primarily preempts military confrontation ...an attempt, if there is/was one, which was deliberately stymied by the American announcement of four new bases on the Philippines just days before the balloon incident. The balloon could just as easily have been a Chinese show of strength authorised by Xi to establish the parameters of that modus vivendi.
It is also preleminary to anticipate that there are a "hardliner faction" in China that was behind the balloon incident. It is only a guess, but not without logic.
Why was the balloon only tracked or noticed while in mid-USA?
Why as it not intercepted before it reached USA?
If civilian, why did the Chinese not speak earlier?
These are the unanswered real questions which would produce a true posotion.
Notice how the American MSM boast about a $.5M missile and $22M aircrafts "protect" US airspace after it left the area.
Much theatre. Much bread and circus.