Balloons

The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon.
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky.
For we can fly. We can fly.

Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon.

Up, Up and Away – The 5thDimension

…..

There are some things we know about the recent experience with the Chinese Spy Balloon. There are a lot more things we don’t know about it and the three other “objects” that we downed by U.S. missiles. In spite of so many unknowns, I think we can make reasonable postulates about the impact that the last few weeks have had or are likely to have on U.S. Foreign Policy.

Let’s start with what we know. I am told by reliable sources that the Chinese probably started this program sometime between 2009 and 2015 as a backup intelligence gathering methodology in the event that the U.S. disabled some or all of their satellites. The Chinese say that it was not a spy balloon, but the CCP lies more than they tell the truth about most everything. It was a spy balloon. They have likely traversed U.S. territorial waters over Guam, Hawaii and Alaska in the past. But surveillance in the past has been looking for things going fast (like missiles and bombers) rather than things going slowly. When they changed these metrics, they shot down three still officially unidentified objects until they likely recalibrated the metrics again so as not to create panic.

Apparently, the Biden administration did not want to shoot the balloon down at all, but believed they had no choice after the public concern about it and as it became visible from the ground. The administration assures us that the other three unidentified “objects” were not “alien in origin.” As a certified geek since high school who grew up as a full-blown Star Trekkie and SciFi fanatic, I kind of wanted at least one of them to be alien. I just hope they aren’t the sort of aliens pictured in the famous Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” If you aren’t familiar with it, “To Serve Man….It’s a cookbook!!!”

Moving along from outer space, the balloon controversy seems to have, pun intended, blown over.

But has it? For a week, Americans watched the drama of a “hostile aircraft” moving over the continental U.S. Such a thing has not been seen since 1941 save for the occasional Soviet transgression during the cold war. Nixon “opened” China in 1971 and for decades the view of much of America (including me, by the way) was that bringing China into the world economy through trade and exchange would lead to the grip of communism loosening there. We have been wrong. China used the income from trade to do many things. They used it to subsidize its own industries thereby putting western competitors out of business so they have much monopoly power; to steal secrets and intellectual property from the west; to strengthen the control of the CCP over the country and to make that control increasingly brutal with slavery and political assassination rampant; and to build up their military machine to go from defensive to aggressive and the second most powerful in the world. They have not in any way allowed that prosperity from the free west to bring any degree of freedom to their own people. And they won’t stop there. Their ambitions are much greater and more dangerous.

But yet, we in the west continue to buy their stuff, teach their kids, and ignore their human rights abuses. To watch many of the financial investment reports out there, investing in companies or industries controlled by the CCP is no different than investing in London, except that they often say the returns will be better in China so go there.

Decades of financial entanglements cannot be unwound overnight. But, like the deficit, we need to start. Last year I went to Target in Scottsdale to buy a countertop microwave oven. There were eight brands. Every single one of them was made in China. I am willing to pay more for one made in Mexico, Vietnam, India or Taiwan, not to mention the U.S. But that option did not exist.

This has to stop. The balloon may have been a strategic error on the part of the CCP if it galvanizes U.S. public opinion to the understand that Communist China is a hostile power and we should not treat them like Norway.

But the CCP is not stupid. There are many senior administration officials, major universities, wealthy investors and CEOs and even non-profits who have made a great deal of money from the Chinese and stand to make more in the future. That self-interest towers over the national interest for many of these people and organizations. But the pulse of public opinion affects them as well. If the balloon has helped to turn public opinion to be more cognizant of the threat, than it is probably a good thing.

And then there is the latest information released by the Biden administration that the Chinese may send weapons to Russia to use in the war against Ukraine. A new stronger “axis of evil” alliance? A move closer to a conflict between the great powers?

International affairs is one of our four dimensions of the coming chaos. More on the entanglements between China, Russia and Ukraine next week.

Until then, I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free