23.02.2023

Bellicose balloonacy

Ludicrous allegations against China reveal a political system that is losing touch with rational thought, says Daniel Lazare

“The No1 global risk today is US domestic politics.” So said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen, according to The New York Times at the height of this month’s balloon mania.

He could not have been more correct. America’s descent into ‘balloonacy’ is ludicrous on one level, but revealing and dangerous on another. Republicans and Democrats huffed and puffed over China’s alleged violation of US airspace, secretary of state Antony Blinken cancelled an important diplomatic meeting in response, while the administration ended up sending a $200 million F-22 jet fighter armed with a $400,000 heat-seeking Sidewinder missile to shoot down what was little more than a runaway weather balloon.

If ever there was a case of making a mountain out of a molehill, this was it. Yet over the next couple of weeks heroic American pilots would shoot down three more balloons that, as the White House now admits, were not even of Chinese origin. Rather, they may have been foil ‘pico balloons’ that civilian hobbyists purchase for as little as $12 on the internet. One such group - a club calling itself the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade - fears that a balloon it sent aloft may have been the ‘UFO’ that an F-22 downed over the Yukon on February 11. But that has not stopped the US from mobilising to defeat such “threats”, as if they were a swarm of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The balloons are exempt from US aviation regulations because they weigh less than six pounds each and are considered harmless. Outfitted with small GPS tracking devices, they enable fans to watch happily, as they ascend to 50,000 feet or more, doubling or tripling in size as they circumnavigate the globe.¹ Dozens may be floating through the stratosphere at any given moment - that is in addition to the 60,000 weather balloons that the US National Weather Service sends up each year, along with thousands of weather balloons that other countries launch as well.²

China’s statement that the original balloon was “of a civilian nature [and] used for scientific research such as meteorology” was therefore eminently plausible. So was the foreign ministry’s claim about the balloon’s direction: “Affected by the westerly wind and with limited self-control ability, the airship seriously deviated from the scheduled route.” The statement ended on an appropriate note of contrition: “China regrets that the airship strayed into the United States due to force majeure. China will continue to maintain communication with the US to properly handle the unexpected situation.”³

All of which comes across as polite, businesslike and mature. Yet it had zero effect on US congressmen, who competed with one another to see who could be more bombastic and indignant. It also had no effect on the Biden administration, which felt obliged to match such blowhards word for word. Senator Jon Tester, an obscure Montana Democrat, started things off by declaring, “I will always defend Montana and our national security from hostile adversaries like China.”

Senator Roger Wicker - a Mississippi Republican who made headlines in 2021 by threatening Russia with a nuclear first strike - followed suit by accusing the Biden administration of a “disastrous projection of weakness” by waiting until the balloon had drifted off the South of Carolina coast before shooting it down. Mike Pompeo, secretary of state under Donald Trump and now a likely Republican presidential candidate in 2024, upped the ante by tweeting: “The Biden administration’s weakness is provocative. Xi Jinping and the CCP are growing bolder because of it. Shoot down the CCP’s balloon safely, and demand answers from Xi.” Finally, Nikki Haley, UN ambassador under Trump and now an official presidential candidate, chimed in with a tweet declaring: “Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.”

To which Biden, his face set on grim, could only declare during his state of the union address on February 7: “Make no mistake about it. As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”

How a wayward balloon threatens US sovereignty was not explained. Montana has twice as many cows as people and is so flat and empty that a truck can drive for miles without encountering another vehicle. Yet supposedly it was this piece of real estate that China was setting out to conquer. To be sure, Montana also has dozens of underground missile silos, billed as America’s ultimate deterrent against nuclear Armageddon. But, according to the Pentagon, there is nothing that a balloon can learn that spy satellites, armed with bigger telescopes and more powerful radio-interception devices, cannot pick up better and more easily. Yet spy satellites are perfectly legal under the Outer Space Treaty, which 135 countries have signed since 1967. That is why dozens are presently circling the globe, peering down into America’s deepest and darkest secrets (even as US satellites peer down into other countries’ secrets as well).

Paranoid style

So why such a fuss over a balloon that is big and visible, and bound to set off a diplomatic flurry, once it heaves into view? Since espionage is supposed to be secret, does that not defeat the purpose? But Washington did not care that the spy-balloon story made no sense. All politicians knew is that China is evil, that it is capable of any crime under the sun, and that it therefore must be capable of espionage too. Why bother with facts, when US congressmen already know?

This is what the historian Richard J Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style” of American politics in a famous essay in 1964. The example Hofstadter had in mind was Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who, 14 years earlier, had set off waves of hysteria by declaring in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 communist agents working in the US state department. Democrats scrambled for cover while president Dwight Eisenhower kept his head low, even though it was his state department that McCarthy was talking about. Hofstadter described the paranoid style as a mix of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy” - a combination that was seemingly unstoppable because everyone else was too frightened to speak up: ” Hofstadter wrote:

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated ... This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals and, since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.⁴

But the paranoid style was more complicated than Hofstadter realised, even though he coined the term. Back in the 1950s, it was not McCarthy who was roiling the waters so much as US imperialism, which needed McCarthy to mount a sweeping purge at home, so it could strengthen the anti-Soviet struggle abroad. McCarthy was given free rein, which is why it was only when he sought to extend the purge to the US army that the defence establishment decided that enough was enough and it was time for him to go. Three years later, ‘Tailgunner Joe’ was dead as a result of an alcohol-related illness.

Today, the paranoid style is even more complicated. Instead of battling the Soviet Union, the US is battling an incipient alliance between post-Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which, despite a burgeoning capitalist sector, remains in some sense a ‘deformed’ workers’ state - to use Trotsky’s term for a polity that did not fall into Stalinism, but which was shaped by Stalinism from the get-go. In the wake of the attempted January 6 2021 coup d’état, US politics are in turmoil, with a Republican-controlled House preparing to lay siege to a Biden administration that still has two years to go until the next election.

As Zheng Yongnian indicates, it is the combination of political turbulence at home that is setting off waves of instability abroad, as the US struggles to hold onto global hegemony in the face of a PRC that is now the second largest economy on earth. The US already has one war on its hands - a conflict in the Ukraine that is not going well, as Russia mounts its long-awaited offensive. But now it is facing a second conflict in the western Pacific that could conceivably be many times worse.

“[P]oll after poll demonstrate that American support for Ukraine is slipping away,” a New York Times op-ed writer complained on February 19. “While Americans have sympathy for Ukraine, declining percentages are willing to spend American resources to keep Ukraine in the fight.” But the US must not go “wobbly”, columnist David French said, because “There is no better way to prevent American men and women from dying in European battlefields than helping Ukraine defeat Russia and thereby deterring a general European war.”⁵

And, since China refuses to go along with the anti-Russian economic blockade and, worse, may be on the verge of supplying Russia with weapons and ammunition, a growing military showdown with China must go on too. Wobbliness must be banished, even though the conflict is zooming out of control.

Hegemony

Thus, the hysteria in Washington was less over Chinese balloons in particular than over China in general. The more Republicans and Democrats compete to see who can ratchet the belligerency up ever higher, the more they push the country into war. A military clash with the PRC is irrational, since it would not be a proxy war, in which the US is able to keep a safe distance while others do its fighting for it, but a direct military clash in China’s backyard in which US losses would potentially be huge.

It is crazy, yet surrendering global hegemony without a fight is also crazy from a bourgeois perspective. So capitalism must employ irrational political forces at home to advance an irrational goal of global domination.

Paranoia has a purpose. By engaging in free-form hysteria over something as absurd as an errant weather balloon, the US wants China to believe that it is so crazy that it will not shrink from a fight. This is what Richard Nixon once described as “the madman theory”. According to top aide HR Haldeman, it went like this:

I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war [Nixon reportedly said]. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.⁶

Nixon was cool and calculating, so his craziness was an act - something North Vietnam clearly suspected all along. But Washington is no longer making it up - it is crazy, something that China is already no doubt factoring into its calculations. It is using craziness to talk itself into an irrational act and, what is worse, is already halfway there. If America loses its head over a foil balloon, how it will respond in the event of a real confrontation in the South China Sea?

We know the answer: it will respond irrationally - at which point the war will be on.