*Photo: Department of Defense
We exist in a time of growing tension. Rather than ending, the once dormant Cold War between a capitalist West and a communist East has returned in force. Conflicts between the United States and China as the two dominant forces in the world and its economy have been escalating since the Trump Administration, during which newly set protectionist policies and poor management of international relations instigated an ongoing trade war. Now, matters have escalated even further with the destruction of a spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina.
Despite the publicity of the balloon, it isn’t an exceptional case, even under the same timeframe. According to the US Department of State, the handful of unidentified objects shot down are part of a fleet sent over five continents and forty nations, including Latin America and Europe. The balloon was the fifth Chinese balloon to be spotted over the continental United States since 2017 and is only one of many unidentified flying objects suspected to be Chinese in origin. The balloon’s path is suspected to cross over Alaska and Western Canada, eventually entering Montana on February 1st, where it was first photographed and tracked until its famous destruction on February 4th. During its monitoring, a US defense official claimed its capacity to gather intelligence was limited. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the Pentagon in junction with the Airforce worked to gather information and intelligence on the small craft while blocking its view of confidential information, as the US Department of Defence later stated. According to a report by CNN, the balloon was discovered and tracked primarily by the signals it was transmitting, though all transmission ceased when the balloon was found, further acting against Chinese claims that the balloon was a meteorological instrument blown off course.
Truth be told, using balloons as weapons of war is not uncommon practice even today, and despite the seeming absurdity, immensely practical. A balloon can reach well into the stratosphere, up to about 120,000 feet off the ground, making it higher up than aircraft but lower than satellites, giving the balloons a clearer image while helping avoid detection. Furthermore, balloons inside of the Earth’s atmosphere are caught in its rotation, allowing it to observe a single spot for a longer period. They show up far smaller than aircraft on radar signatures, appearing similar to small birds, and their lack of infrared signatures makes them near impossible to spot with modern instruments. A piece of equipment tied to a giant bag is also far cheaper, making them expendable when discovered. Balloons have even been used in testing to quietly drop bombs on major targets. These elements of stealth and usefulness make balloons effective for covert operations and have ensured their use for most of history.
Ballooning was one of the earliest military technologies, being used as early as the 3rd Century by the Han dynasty to send messages across battlefields. Military ballooning reached its peak in the first World War, but more relevant to the spy balloons of today is their extensive use by both the Eastern Bloc, a term used to refer to the collection of communist nations throughout Euroasia, and the US. The largest of America’s ballooning operations, known as Project Genetrix, was launched in the 1950s by the CIA and involved hundreds of balloons sent over Soviet Russia and China. Similar to the balloons of today, they were disguised as meteorological instruments and photographed communist operations in what Eisenhower would later insist to be defensive operations. This was one in a long line of Cold War ballooning operations, and unless aircraft become as discrete and cheap as balloons, they’re here to stay.
Of course, there is underneath the humor of the destroyed spycraft a more unfortunate truth. We are entering a new phase of the Cold War. Chinese fear of invasion from increasing military presence and strength in Japan, disputes over Taiwan, trade wars, and controversy regarding China’s public nonmilitary support of Russia in the Ukraine war all came to a head at the Munich Security Conference on February 18th. Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met to discuss the war in Ukraine, with the balloon being referred to by Wang Yi as a display of amusing hysteria. The “no limits” alliance Russia and China have held was unshaken, and ultimately the Conference only served to worsen relations. Congress in a recent committee on the CCP came to an uncharacteristically bipartisan agreement regarding China's threat; rather than attempting to act as a publicity stunt, as most of modern politics seem to be, the committee advocated cooperation in Congress to work against “malign activities,” as Republican Representative LaHood stated. Former security adviser HR McMaster argues that China in its present state serves as a greater threat to national security than Soviet Russia once did during the height of the Cold War, and with matters in the place they are, it is impossible to be sure where the world will go going forward.
Since the conclusion of the World Wars, Earth has fluctuated in and out of seemingly imminent annihilation. We live in such turbulent times. The planet is off-kilter, and with the open and cold war, with trade wars and disease, with the world seemingly changed forever, it's a strange time to be alive. Except it isn't exceptional circumstances we exist in. Go back in time, and you find one crisis after another. Before we were aware of it, before we were alive, the world seemed just as dire. Going back, we have the war in the Middle East, the crash of 2008, another economic recession in the 1990s, and then back into the full force
of the Cold War. Stable isn’t the modern world and hasn’t been for a long time. But life goes on. We cannot be sure whether China and the US will be able to pull themselves from one brink of hundreds the world has danced upon, but somehow the world will go on regardless.