SAINTS PRESERVE US

That Moon Is a Balloon

The recent spate of news stories regarding the errant Chinese “weather” balloon has intrigued me. It wasn’t a genuine foo fighter – a term used by Allied pilots during the Second World War to describe the inexplicable, tricks of light maybe – because an American fighter jet eventually shot it out of the sky and out of harm’s way over the Atlantic Ocean. Still, above the clouds and just a little off course the balloon was able to hover over an undisclosed number of US military installations including a major Air Force Base (read: missile) in Montana.

The Pentagon was swift in assuring Americans that the Chinese spy balloon was comically redundant in that any superficial intelligence it gathered was more easily collected by satellite. Still, relatively speaking, balloons fly a lot closer to the ground. This incident is riding the draft of recent articles in reputable publications such as The Economist and The Globe and Mail that Pentagon brass is anticipating armed conflict with China sooner than later; a whole new China syndrome, comrade. What’s two years at the outside in seconds on the Doomsday Clock?

On August 25, 2017, The New York Times published a fascinating conversation between British authors John le Carre (espionage fiction) and Ben Macintyre (espionage nonfiction). The story was called “Spies Like Us.” In it they speculated about unsavoury allegations of then-US President der Trumpenfuhrer’s behaviour in a Moscow hotel room while he was still a brash celebrity businessman shilling rights to his self-promotion. The Russians apparently possessed some kompromat that took the piss out of a KGB “honey trap” in an Ian Fleming James Bond novel. The spy writers surmised that because the allegations were so absurd as to be easily deniable, the Kremlin’s real message to der Trumperfuhrer was the existence of a less salacious though equally damning file of compromising material. Macintyre likened the knowledge to a stone in the presidential Gucci loafer.

His analogy of an irritant, cunning and conniving, certainly describes the Chinese provocation. The US is a sharply divided country. Its body politic is a rabid, feral beast. Any decision a Democratic commander-in-chief would make in the wake of briefings from his team of advisors would be wrong in Republican eyes. “We should have shot this balloon down over the Aleutians instead of letting it float across middle America on its merry way,” Senator Tom Cotton huffed on the partisan Fox network. Gee, those islands are awfully close to Russia and relations with that country aren’t quite at their best these days. Great idea, Tom! Probably exactly the expedient solution the Chinese were praying for.

The Chinese have subsequently and gleefully played the Claude Raines Casablanca card. Beijing officials professed shock at the decadent capitalist curs’ harebrained hysteria and “obvious overreaction” to a minor meteorological mishap. A Chinese Communist Party-approved commentator wrote on state-sanctioned social media: “China is dealing with an America that gets drunk without drinking, suffering the enmity generated by its internal feuds that spill over into the international arena.” While the delivery is somewhat flowery and as hyperbolic, as is the norm with Chinese propaganda, the comrade’s sentiments are not incorrect.

History always dates the fall of an empire with a “circa” caveat. It doesn’t happen overnight. Perhaps America’s apex began to wane with the country’s full nelson embrace of the Domino Theory which posited that vulnerable countries would submit to the lure of communism in geographic sequence. Those covert and overt adventurous gambles in Vietnam, Latin America and the Caribbean didn’t payout double at the window. Still, it was a consistent and coherent policy that spanned administrations both Democrat and Republican. Everybody else got the message.

Waxing, inscrutable China seems to be eyeballing the top spot in a new world order bracket. The traditional powerhouse, the old school, isn’t recruiting players as it once did. One can’t imagine the stern and grey Chinese iron-fisted ruling apparatus possessed of a sense of mischief and humour, but there’s a real, snickering frat house vibe to this whole overblown balloon incident: “Hold my beer. Watch this!” It's Animal House with the US playing Dean Wormer.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of international intrigue since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.