China’s balloon flight over the United States was a brazen, foolish affront by Beijing. The U.S. Navy has just released new images of the ballon after it was shot down. But how much should Americans really worry about the incident? Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called it a national security “crisis.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., declared it “a Sputnik moment.” Most colorfully, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., brought a white balloon to Tuesday’s State of the Union address. She warned that Beijing was able to “spy on multiple, multiple military bases with critical infrastructure.”
This rhetoric is pure hot air. Most likely, Beijing gained little useful intelligence from its aerial misadventure. It also embarrassed itself on the world stage — reinforcing China’s reputation for clumsy, intrusive surveillance and the flouting of international rules. But while Americans don’t have much to fear from the balloon, we should worry about our lost sense of proportion. Espionage is a fact of life, yet U.S. discourse often fails to distinguish severe incidents from banal ones. If this pattern continues, the next Chinese spying scandal — however trivial — may spark a true bilateral crisis.
As a former intelligence officer, I know that spying is an everyday occurrence. China and the United States both continuously target each other with high volumes of cyber operations, signals interception, satellite imaging, human agent recruitment, open-source data mining and beyond.
The two sides aren’t equivalent; Beijing is more reckless and abusive in its means and its ends. U.S. intelligence agencies, unlike their Chinese counterparts, don’t routinely repress minorities and dissidents or hand over foreign trade secrets to domestic companies. And Chinese spying over the years has done great harm to American security.
The balloon incident is a reminder that the severity of a threat doesn’t always…
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