The real news behind the news of the putative Chinese spy balloon

The U.S. spies more on China and the intelligence is useless

The contrived alarm over a Chinese spy balloon hovering over Billings, Montana, again verifies that the lion’s share of politics is play acting, i.e., that as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, “All the world’s a state and all the men and women merely players, each with their entrances and exits.”

The Chinese prevaricated in characterizing the balloon as meteorological aircraft blown off course. But they were only following the playbook of United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960, through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, describing the U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers and shot down over the Soviet Union as a weather aircraft that lost its way.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken postponed an official trip to China. Pretending to be clueless of the vastly greater surveillance of the United States targeting China through the national security agency and spy flights along the Chinese coast and occasionally into its airspace, Secretary Blinken feigned high dungeon to his Chinese counterpart. He assailed the balloon as “an irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law….” If the NSA targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkle for surveillance, imagine its 24/7 spying on Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark) screamed at the Biden administration to cancel the diplomacy. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) demanded an urgent “Gang of Eight” intelligence briefing from President Joe Biden. (The gang consists of congressional leadership plus the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees). House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-TX) declared it was “imperative” that Secretary Blinken scold President Xi and the PRC that “their military adventurism will no longer be tolerated.”

All governments bent on war turn fleas into elephants. President William McKinley turned the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba, by explosion into a casus belli (Remember the Maine) for declaring war against Spain. The U.S. Navy (Admiral Hyman Rickover) determined the most credible explanation was the spontaneous combustion of coal in the ship’s bunker.

President Woodrow Wilson manufactured an excuse for the United States to commence war against Germany in 1917 based on a tiny number of deaths caused by German submarines sinking vessels in war zones carrying American passengers or merchants (many containing contraband like ammunition on the Lusitania. President Wilson’s Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest.

Not only has the Chinese spy balloon incident been blown wildly out of proportion, so has the corollary implication that spying is a cornerstone of national security. Spying has never deflected the narrative of human history. The fabled Ultra secret in World War II enabling the deciphering of Nazi battle commands was a peppercorn in the Allies’ victory. The Soviet Union would have developed an atomic weapon if Julius Rosenberg had never lived. The massive spying of the United States targeting the Soviet Union for decades was a featherweight in its dissolution compared with Glasnost and Perestroika embraced by Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and disbelieved by the C.I.A. The United States deciphering of Japanese cables did not impact the outcome of the 1922 Washington Naval Conference nor head off Pearl Harbor.

Spying is a vastly overpriced placebo which creates a false sense of security through the pretense of foreknowledge. It endures because the leaders of the intelligence community resist shouting the Emperor has no clothes to preserve their jobs and stature.