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U.S. shoots down
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U.S. shoots down “high-altitude object” over Alaska – CBS News
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Washington forges rare political unity in condemning China over balloon drama | CNN Politics
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China’s audacious spy balloon flight across North America has spectacularly backfired by enshrining rare bipartisan unity in Washington.
The coming together of Republicans and Democrats is certain to stiffen future US strategic, economic and military resolve in the Pacific region and further damage buckled relations with Beijing.
The fierce congressional reaction to the balloon and the US government’s disclosure of intelligence about it and China’s balloon espionage program, meanwhile, threatened to further damage the world’s most crucial diplomatic relationship – especially after China hit back by accusing the US of being the world’s most gratuitous spy state.
The unanimity of American anger toward China was exemplified by a House resolution condemning China that passed by a stunning 419-0 margin. It followed a growing realization in Washington, and more broadly across the country, that a long-predicted geopolitical confrontation may now be a reality.
But despite the united political front in Washington, fury is boiling in both parties over the failure to down the balloon before it traversed the continent amid rising questions about the implications of China’s breach of US airspace. Administration officials faced a gauntlet of criticism from lawmakers during a classified briefing on the issue on Thursday. And Republicans stepped up efforts to brand President Joe Biden as weak over the incursion despite his warning to President Xi Jinping in his State of the Union address earlier this week that he would vigorously defend US sovereignty.
This growing discord threatens to so politicize China policy that it will drain any efforts to defuse an escalating Cold War. The Biden administration wants to pursue those efforts despite the tensions caused by the balloon crisis.
There’s also a risk that Republican efforts to leverage the drama for domestic political gain could bust unity over policy toward America’s giant Pacific rival. Such a partisan split would ironically deliver a greater payoff for China’s communist rulers than any information picked up by the balloon over the US.
The unanimous House vote on the incident had not been assured. It required Republican leaders to omit language critical of Biden and followed unusual bipartisan cooperation fostered by Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the top Democrat on the panel, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks. The resolution describes the balloon flight as a brazen violation of US sovereignty. McCaul said the bipartisan nature of the vote was critical and called on everyone to stand together against a “common enemy.”
“We wanted it to be America against China – not internal fighting, because China would see that as a moment of weakness, that we’re divided on party lines, and we didn’t want to project that,” McCaul told CNN.
This strong signal sent to Beijing raises the possibility that the spy balloon mission has demonstrably hurt China’s interests – especially if it results in a bipartisan zeal to increase defense spending, the size of US arms and equipment packages to allow Taiwan to defend against a possible Chinese attack and more resources to US allies.
While there is agreement on the challenge now posed by China, there was mystification and some anger elsewhere in Congress on Thursday, even as officials held classified briefings and the FBI pushed forward on its effort to evaluate intelligence from the remains of the balloon salvaged from the Atlantic after it was shot down on Saturday.
In a Senate hearing, Democrats as well as Republicans, criticized Defense Department officials and questioned why they did not tell Americans more once the balloon was spotted.
“You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before,” said Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who could be facing a tough reelection next year. The balloon floated above his state, which hosts US missile installations. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was furious that the Chinese balloon crossed her state. “As an Alaskan, I am so angry,” Murkowski said. “If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come. They come up and they go over Alaska.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, said he understood why the White House might have kept China’s balloon program classified but added, “We all understand that some of the desire to keep things classified, it has to do with not wanting to disclose to the public things that might be inconvenient politically for the department.” The White House has previously explained that it waited until the balloon was off the Carolinas to shoot it down based on Pentagon advice that doing so before could endanger lives and property on the ground. Officials also said they took steps to ensure it was not an intelligence threat as it wafted across the country.
But some Republicans are accusing the White House of a cover-up that they think exposes Biden as feckless and unfit to be commander-in-chief as he eyes reelection, despite his strong role in standing up to Russia over Ukraine.
“I think the public, and Congress, would never have known about this if the Billings, Montana, paper hadn’t published a picture that showed the balloon and US assets tracking the balloon. I think their plan was clearly to keep this a secret,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN after a classified briefing.
“The United States was grossly unprepared, this administration was grossly unprepared, and frankly I think it was a huge mistake for them not to take down the balloon before it entered the continental United States,” Hawley added.
While the House vote on the resolution condemning China was unanimous, many Republicans used the debate before the resolution passed to lacerate the Biden administration.
“We watched in real time from our backyards and workplaces as a foreign aircraft equipped with spyware navigated over our neighborhoods, our military installations and our vital infrastructure,” said Missouri GOP Rep. Ann Wagner, the vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“The administration again showed the dictatorship in Beijing that they could again be bullied. President Biden’s weakness and indecision sends a dangerous signal to our adversaries like Iran and Russia and North Korea.”
Still, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said he came away from the classified briefing more confident in the administration.
“I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care,” Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said.
Besides the classified briefings, Biden administration officials divulged new information about the balloon to the public Thursday, some of it gleaned by flybys by U-2 spy planes before it was downed. A senior State Department official said the balloon had been capable of conducting signals intelligence collection – or intelligence gathered by electronic means – and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”
Beijing is likely to be irked by more details being made public about its balloon program, as evidenced by comments by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning in a briefing Thursday.
“I am not aware of any ‘fleet of balloons,’” Mao said. “That narrative is probably part of the information and public opinion warfare the US has waged on China. As to who is the world’s number one country of spying, eavesdropping and surveillance, that is plainly visible to the international community,” she added.
Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Xi’s knowledge, sources familiar with Hill briefings said. But the idea Xi was unaware of balloon “is the working theory and an ongoing intelligence gap,” a source briefed on the matter said.
Intelligence experts in the United States have been perplexed at the political furor stoked by a mere balloon – a comparatively unsophisticated asset that pales in significance compared to multi-pronged Chinese intelligence operations against the United States including economic, cyber and traditional espionage. Indeed, the US mounts a similarly broad collection mission against China, which was exposed when a Chinese jet fighter collided with a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea in 2001.
But the balloon flight, over US territory, has had a symbolic impact greater than that so far generated amid years of building tensions with China, including over Taiwan.
“I would never have imagined that my Saturday afternoon would have been disrupted due to a Chinese spy balloon not – only that floated across most of South Carolina, it floated across the entire continental United States,” said freshman Republican Rep. Russell Fry whose South Carolina district contains coastal areas where the balloon was shot down.
“It does – if you watch it, and you were there on the ground – sound like it was straight out of a sci-fi movie,” he said on the House floor, blasting the Biden administration for negligence and bemoaning an international incident that unfolded off the shores of Myrtle Beach.
In the Senate, the dramatic events of the past week have caused a reassessment of years of US-China policy, which has seen efforts by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations to try to usher China peacefully into the global economy degenerate into a brewing confrontation in the Trump and Biden administrations.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said at a hearing that the Biden administration did not “see another Cold War, but we do ask everyone to play by the same set of rules.”
The problem, however, is that China interprets such US calls as an attempt to thwart what it sees as its rightful rise as a regional and global superpower. Sherman argued that US policy in the 21st century designed to head off confrontation had not failed, but that conditions in China had changed.
“Xi Jinping is not the Xi Jinping of the 1990’s that we all thought we knew,” Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She added that China under Xi was “the only country that wants to change that rules-based order, that can successfully do so and are trying to make that happen.”
“It is true that our way of life, our democracy, our belief in our values, in the rules-based international order is being challenged,” she continued. “And we have to meet that challenge.”
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China failing to answer U.S. crisis line call during balloon incident highlights
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Washington — Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions. But Austin’s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.
China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action had “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday.It’s been an experience that’s frustrated U.S. commanders for decades, when it comes to getting their Chinese counterparts on a phone or video line as some flaring crisis is sending tensions between the two nations climbing.
From Americans’ perspective, the lack of the kind of reliable crisis communications that helped get the U.S. and Soviet Union through the Cold War without an armed nuclear exchange is raising the dangers of the U.S.-China relationship now, at a time when China’s military strength is growing and tensions with the U.S. are on the rise.Without that ability for generals in opposing capitals to clear things up in a hurry, Americans worry that misunderstandings, false reports or accidental collisions could cause a minor confrontation to spiral into greater hostilities.
And it’s not about any technical shortfall with the communication equipment, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of Indo-Pacific studies at the German Marshall Fund think tank. The issue is a fundamental difference in the way China and the U.S. view the value and purpose of military-to-military hotlines.
U.S. military leaders’ faith in Washington-to-Beijing hotlines as a way to defuse flare-ups with China’s military has been butting up against a sharply different take – a Chinese political system that runs on slow deliberative consultation by political leaders and makes no room for individually directed, real-time talk between rival generals.
And Chinese leaders are suspicious of the whole U.S. notion of a hotline – seeing it as an American channel for trying to talking their way out of repercussions for a U.S. provocation.
“That’s really dangerous,” Assistant Secretary for Defense Ely Ratner said Thursday of the difficulty of military-to-military crisis communications with China, when Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley pressed him about China’s latest rebuff on Beijing’s and Washington’s hotline setup.
U.S. generals are persisting in their efforts to open more lines of communication with Chinese counterparts, the defense official said, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “And unfortunately, to date, the PLA is not answering that call,” Ratner said, referring to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Ratner accused China of using vital channels of communication simply as a blunter messaging tool, shutting them down or opening them up again to underscore China’s displeasure or pleasure with the U.S.
China’s resistance to military hotlines as tensions increase puts more urgency on efforts by President Joe Biden and his top civilian diplomats and security aides to build up their own communication channels with President Xi Jinping and other top Chinese political officials, for situations where military hotlines may go unanswered, U.S. officials and China experts say.Both U.S. and Chinese militaries are building up for a possible confrontation over U.S.-backed self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. The next flare-up seems only a matter of time. It could happen with an expected event, such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s promised visit to Taiwan, or something unexpected, like the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter and a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. Without commanders talking in real-time, Americans and Chinese would have one less way of averting greater conflict..
“My worry is that the EP-3 type incident will happen again,” said Lyle Morris, a country director for China for the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2021, now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “And we will be in much different political environments of hostility and mistrust, where that could go wrong in a hurry.”Biden has emphasized building lines of communications with China to “responsibly manage” their differences. A November meeting between Xi and Biden yielded an announcement the two governments would resume a range of dialogues that China had shut down after an August Taiwan visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Last weekend, the U.S. canceled what would have been a relationship-building visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the transit of the Chinese balloon, which the U.S. says was for espionage. China claims it was a civilian balloon used for meteorological research.
The same week that China’s balloon flew over the U.S., Austin was in the Philippines to announce an expanded U.S. military footprint there, neighboring China, noted Tiehlin Yen, director of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, a think tank. “America is also very nationalistic these days,” Yen said.
“From a regional security perspective, this dialogue is necessary,” Yen said.
What passes for military and civilian hotlines between China and the U.S. aren’t the classic red phones on a desk.
Under a 2008 agreement, the China-U.S. military hotline amounts to a multistep process by which one capital relays a request to the other for a joint call or videoconference between top officials on encrypted lines. The pact gives the other side 48 hours and up to respond, although nothing in the pact stops top officials from talking immediately.
Sometimes when the U.S. calls, current and former U.S. officials say, Chinese officials don’t even pick up.
“No one answered. It just rang,” recounted Kristen Gunness, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation. Gunness was speaking about a March 2009 incident when she was working as an adviser to the Pentagon’s chief of naval operations. Chinese navy vessels at the time surrounded a U.S. surveillance ship in the South China Sea and demanded the American leave. U.S. and Chinese military officials eventually talked – but some 24 hours later.
It took decades of Washington pushing to get Beijing to agree to the current system of military crisis communications, said David Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who negotiated it.
“And then once we had it in place, it was clear that they were very reluctant to use it in any substantive purpose,” Sedney said.
Americans’ test calls on the hotline would get picked up, he said. And when Americans called to give congratulations on some Chinese holiday, Chinese officials would pick up and say thanks, he said.
Anything more sensitive, Sedney said, the staffers answering the phone “would say, ‘We’ll check. As soon as our leadership is ready to talk, we’ll get back to you.’ Nothing would happen.”[ad_2]
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China’s spy balloon sought to intercept communications, U.S. officials say
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China’s spy balloon sought to intercept communications, U.S. officials say – CBS News
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Balloon ‘panic’ intensifies push against China in Washington
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The fallout from the alleged Chinese “spy” balloon that flew over the United States has cemented a near bipartisan consensus in Washington over the need to “stand up” to Beijing, as competition between the two countries intensifies.
While US officials stress they remain open to dialogue with China despite the renewed tensions, many politicians in Washington are invoking the incident to call for tougher policies.
US President Joe Biden himself warned China against threatening US sovereignty during his annual State of the Union speech, seen by an estimated 23.4 million TV viewers on Tuesday evening.
“The Biden administration has shown that it is very concerned with attacks particularly from the right, from Republican critics, that they are being too soft on China,” said Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, a project that advocates for a more sustainable international economy.
“And because of that pressure coming in from the right, I think we often see them leaning further in the direction of confrontational politics.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a previously scheduled trip to Beijing over the balloon incident, which the Biden administration has called an “unacceptable” violation of American sovereignty.
The US military shot down the balloon on Saturday as it flew over the Atlantic Ocean, after days of debate and congressional calls to bring it down.
In his State of the Union speech, Biden said the US is not seeking confrontation in its competition with China but warned that Washington will stand up for its interests against Beijing.
“As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country — and we did,” he said.
What do we know about the balloon?
Little is publicly known about the Chinese balloon or what it was doing in US airspace. Nonetheless, its presence caused a significant political stir and produced countless news headlines and wall-to-wall coverage.
China initially expressed regret for the incident, describing the balloon as a civilian airship used for meteorological research that “deviated far from its planned course”. Beijing later condemned the US hit to bring down the aircraft.
But the Pentagon insisted it was a “high-altitude surveillance balloon”, although US defence officials said the balloon did not pose a “military or physical threat”.
Still, some Republican lawmakers kept describing the aircraft as a risk to national security.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton denounced the Biden administration for allowing the balloon to traverse the continental US for days before shooting it down.
Cotton told Fox News earlier this week that he felt the delay in Biden’s response was “dangerous for the American people”. He also accused the administration of pushing to salvage Blinken’s visit to Beijing, which he described as “already ill-advised”.
US officials had previously said that, if the balloon were brought down over land, falling debris could “potentially cause civilian injuries or deaths or significant property damage”.
Christopher Heurlin, an associate professor of government and Asian studies at Bowdoin College in the US state of Maine, said while the balloon may not have been a direct threat to Americans, it created a “shock” in the country.
“We like to think in the United States that we live in North America and we’re oceans away from any kind of competitors — and in that sense, not very vulnerable,” Heurlin told Al Jazeera.
“Whereas having the spy balloon flying overhead, I think, does create some kind of visceral sense of vulnerability in the collective psyche.”
China has condemned the US hit on the balloon [Chad Fish via AP Photo] As for Blinken’s trip, Heurlin said “political considerations” played a role in the decision to postpone it.
“I’m not sure that politically Biden would have been able to get away with sending Secretary of State Blinken to China under these circumstances,” he told Al Jazeera.
Chow, the director of Justice Is Global, agreed that the “panic” over the balloon likely led to postponing the visit.
“I think the Biden administration correctly judged that the balloon was not really that big of a deal,” Chow told Al Jazeera. “But they felt overwhelmed by this wave of media coverage and this very extreme freakout from the right.”
How we got here
The balloon incident came against the backdrop of growing animosity between Washington and Beijing.
Last year, the White House released a national security strategy that described China as the “most consequential geopolitical challenge” for the US. The Pentagon also prioritised competition with Beijing in its defence strategy.
Both assessments primarily focused on China, not Russia, despite the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, which has disrupted global supply chains for vital goods like food and energy and ushered in the most intense violence in Europe since World War II.
Ties between Beijing and Washington have soured over numerous points of tension in recent years, including trade issues, the status of Taiwan, China’s claims in the South China Sea and an ongoing US push against growing Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.
The US has also been warning China against coming to Russia’s aid in Ukraine.
So how did we get here?
As Washington’s so-called “war on terror” — initiated during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — began to wind down, the US turned its focus to competing with China, whose economic power and push for global influence has been growing.
Chow said the root of the tensions is “neoliberal free-trade globalisation”. That economic framework, he explained, has been experiencing deeper systemic problems since the 2008 financial crisis and has led to “zero-sum competition, which then became the breeding ground for dangerous nationalist politics”.
Heurlin, the professor, linked the current state of affairs between the two countries to economics as well. He said that, with the loss of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, the anger of many in the US has shifted to China.
He added that since the rise of President Xi Jinping in 2012, Beijing has pursued an assertive foreign policy that includes a “vocal defence of Chinese interests”.
“That is something that they’ve been doing really to appeal to Chinese nationalists back home,” Heurlin told Al Jazeera.
“So I think on both sides, this is something that’s been happening for a while. And then especially once Donald Trump comes to the American presidency and starts the trade war with China, that’s when relations really start to bottom out.”
Ultimately, Heurlin said, the US government’s goal is to “maintain its status quo position as the most militarily and economically powerful country in the world”.
What’s next for US-China relations?
Despite the deteriorating relationship, officials in both countries continue to call for cooperation on shared global challenges — namely combatting climate change and the COVID pandemic — as well as warn against confrontation.
But for the foreseeable future, the tensions show no sign of subsiding.
“What we should anticipate is that conflict between the US and China is going to continue and build and escalate over time,” Chow said. “And if things don’t change, then yes, this is going to be a long-term great power conflict that is going to have enormous consequences for people in the US and China and around the world.”
Heurlin echoed that prediction but said he hopes that, with China ending its “zero COVID” policies, more people-to-people interactions between US and Chinese citizens would soften public opinion in both countries.
“It’s getting harder and harder to manage the US-China relationship from the perspective of both Beijing and Washington and I don’t think there really is any kind of magical solution,” he said.
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China to EU: Drop calls for Ukraine’s ‘complete victory’
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Beijing’s top envoy to the EU on Wednesday questioned the West’s call to help Ukraine achieve “complete victory,” on the eve of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s possible arrival in Brussels.
Fu Cong, the Chinese ambassador to the EU, also criticized the bloc for “erosion” of its commitment on Taiwan, warning “senior officials from the EU institutions” to stop visiting the self-ruled island.
Fu’s provocative comments on Ukraine and Taiwan, two of the most sensitive geopolitical controversies between China and the West, come as Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning a trip to Moscow, according to the Russian government.
Insisting that the Russia-Ukraine “conflict” was merely an “unavoidable” talking point, Fu said Beijing otherwise enjoys a multifaceted “traditional friendship” with Moscow.
“Frankly speaking, we are quite concerned about the possible escalation of this conflict,” Fu said at an event hosted by the European Policy Centre in Brussels. “And we don’t believe that only providing weapons will actually solve the problem.”
“We are quite concerned about people talking about winning a complete victory on the battlefield. We believe that the right place would be at the negotiating table,” Fu added.
His remarks come on the same day as Zelenskyy visits London, his first trip to Western Europe since Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost a year ago. POLITICO reported that Zelenskyy — who according to his aides has never had his calls picked up by Xi, while the Chinese leader has instead met or called Putin on multiple occasions over the past year — was also planning a visit to Brussels on Thursday, before bungled EU communications threw the trip into doubt.
The idea of a “complete victory” for Ukraine has been most vocally supported by Baltic and Eastern European countries. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed support for “victory” for Ukraine.
But toeing Xi’s line, Fu said the “security concerns of both sides” — Ukraine as well as Russia — should be taken care of.
Fu also dismissed the comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan, both of which face military threats from a nuclear-armed neighbor.
“I must state up front that [the] Ukrainian crisis and the Taiwan issue are two completely different things. Ukraine is an independent state, and Taiwan is part of China,” he said. “So there’s no comparability between the two issues.”
He went on to criticize the EU’s handling of the Taiwan issue.
“Nowadays, what we’re seeing is that there is some erosion of these basic commitments. We see that the parliamentarians and also senior officials from the EU institutions are also visiting Taiwan,” he said.
The European Commission has not publicized any details of its officials’ visit to Taiwan. The European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm, has not replied to a request for comment.
If the EU signed an investment treaty with Taiwan, Fu said this would “fundamentally change … or shake the foundation” of EU-China relations. “It is that serious.”
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New images show debris from Chinese spy balloon
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New images show debris from Chinese spy balloon – CBS News
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Second Camera Shows Surprise Guest Xi Jinping Backstage Reacting To Everything Biden Saying
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WASHINGTON—Showing the Chinese president grow visibly enraged as he listened to his American counterpart bad-mouth him behind his back, a backstage camera revealed surprise guest Xi Jinping’s reactions to everything President Biden said during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. “You have a problem with me you can’t say to my face, you fake bitch?” said Xi, appearing on a behind-the-scenes feed featuring the chyron “Called U.S. President ‘Lying Hussie’,” where he could be seen breaking down in tears, smashing a mirror in the green room as aides held him back, and then rushing out to confront Biden as Congress whooped in applause. “Oh, so you can say you don’t like my spy balloon on national TV, but you don’t mention the trillion bucks you owe me, you broke-ass ho? Hey, get back here so I can beat your ass. Or run away, like you run from all our problems!” At press time, Biden had reportedly managed to calm Xi down by offering the weeping leader a box of tissues and agreeing to joint custody of Taiwan.
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U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon
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A balloon flies in the sky over Billings, Montana, U.S. February 1, 2023, in this picture obtained from social media.
Chase Doak via Reuters
The U.S. military on Saturday shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, according to media reports.
Department of Defense officials have not yet confirmed the balloon being shot down.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop in parts of North Carolina and South Carolina and closed additional airspace on Saturday afternoon. The departures were paused “to support the Department of Defense in a national security effort,” a representative told CNBC.
President Joe Biden broke his silence about the balloon for the first time Saturday, telling a group of reporters, “We’re going to take care of it.”
The high-altitude balloon was initially spotted over Billings, Montana, on Wednesday. Defense officials said the Pentagon considered shooting down the balloon earlier this week but decided against it after briefing Biden. The decision was made in consultation with senior leaders, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Biden concluded that the U.S. would not shoot down the balloon because debris from it could cause damage on the ground, a Pentagon official said. Moreover, any information the balloon collects would have “limited additive value” compared with China’s spy satellites.
China’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that the balloon was a civilian weather airship intended for scientific research that was blown off course. It described the incident as a result of a “force majeure” for which it was not responsible.
This claim was summarily dismissed by U.S. officials. A senior Pentagon official told reporters Thursday night that the object was clearly a surveillance balloon that was flying over sensitive sites to collect intelligence.
“We have noted the PRC statement of regret, but the presence of this balloon in our airspace is a clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law and is unacceptable that this has occurred,” the official said.
The presence of the balloon prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to indefinitely postpone what was to be an already tense trip to China on Friday.
The visit was intended to reinforce communication and cooperation between the two countries as tensions have deepened over China’s increasing military aggression toward Taiwan and closer alliances with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Instead, Blinken told China’s director of Central Foreign Affairs Office, Wang Yi, in a phone call Friday that the balloon was an “irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose of the trip,” according to a readout of the discussion.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
—CNBC’s Christina Wilkie and Amanda Macias contributed to this report
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Blinken cancels China trip over suspected spy balloon
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What happens to Europe when the balloon goes up?
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BERLIN — The saga of the Chinese spy balloon has plunged relations between Washington and Beijing into fresh crisis. For European governments, that spells all kinds of trouble.
With relations worsening between the two superpowers, EU leaders seem likely to come under intensifying pressure from the White House to pick sides and join forces against China, just as they were hoping for a thaw in tricky relations with Beijing.
And then there’s the war.
Russia is preparing a major offensive in Ukraine over the next few weeks but EU diplomats fear the balloon incident risks distracting President Joe Biden’s team at exactly the moment when American support for Kyiv will be needed most.
“We never expected 2023 to be easy, but this is off to a really tough start,” one European diplomat said.
On Saturday, the U.S. shot down what it identified as a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina with an air-to-air missile from an F-22 stealth fighter jet.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken indefinitely postponed a visit to Beijing that had been scheduled for this week, the first such trip planned for a U.S. cabinet-level official under Biden’s presidency.
Images of the incident have circulated in dramatic video footage on social media, taken mostly by excited onlookers cheering the theatrical show of military might.
Beijing insists the giant solar panel-powered object was a “civilian airship” that went off course while conducting “mainly meteorological” research. In response to the missile strike, the Chinese government expressed “strong dissatisfaction” and protested against the use of force by the U.S. to attack the unmanned, civilian craft. It added that it would “reserve the right to take further necessary responses.”
U.S. foreign policy, while still heavily invested in supporting Ukraine militarily, may be distracted by the sharpening clashes with Beijing. Right-wing U.S. politicians have been calling for more attention on China since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago.
As the “U.S.-China rivalry sharpens, there will be more pressure on Europeans, whose approach to China is very diverse, to pick sides,” said Ricardo Borges de Castro, head of the Europe in the World Program at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank. “The reality is, if the world becomes increasingly dominated by two poles — U.S. and China — the EU and Europeans will need to pick sides for as long as Europe’s security and defense depends on the U.S. umbrella.”
Russia, in the meantime, is expected to launch massive offensives in just a few weeks, when the harshest winter season comes to an end, according to Ukrainian officials.
A plane flies past the Chinese spy balloon (top right) | Nell Redmond/EPA “Washington will be busy with Beijing for some time now,” a senior EU diplomat said on Sunday. “It’s not goodnews for the EU because Russia is still the main concern.”
Bad timing
For Europe, the incident also comes at an inconvenient moment as senior officials have been preparing to re-engage with Beijing.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, is understood to be making plans for a trip to Beijing in April, when he would also be expected to travel to Japan for a G7 ministerial meeting. Separately, French President Emmanuel Macron has also announced his intention to meet President Xi Jinping in the Chinese capital early this year; he would be interested in taking a top official from the European Commission to join him, according to an official with knowledge of the plans.
The latest U.S.-China flare-up “means that we would now have to be watching how badly China reacts, and whether these [planned] trips will be treated as a propaganda success by Beijing in splitting up the transatlantic ties,” a diplomat said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak on this subject.
“In the wake of the Ukraine war, the China policy coordination between both sides of the [the Atlantic is] losing steam,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, chair of the European Parliament’s delegation on relations with China. “While Washington D.C. enhances pressure against Beijing particularly on the technological front and in the Taiwan context, Brussels, Berlin and Paris show new hesitancy.”
Further complicating matters is Beijing’s apparent lack of interest in helping the West put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine.
Worse, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, China has emerged as the dominant supplier of dual-use goods to Russia, providing technology that Moscow’s military needs to prosecute its invasion. Chinese state-owned defense companies have shipped navigation equipment, jamming technology and fighter-jet parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies, according to the article.
European leaders have repeatedly warned Beijing not to aid Moscow militarily.
China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, has dropped a plan to visit Brussels even though he would be traveling to Germany for the Munich Security Conference in February, two diplomats told POLITICO.
Europe’s reaction to the balloon incident was muted. The EU merely noted the U.S.’s right to defend its airspace. “Safety and protection of airspace is an issue of national security and therefore a competence, responsibility and prerogative” of the specific state or states involved, an EU spokesperson said on Sunday.
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu visited Moscow last week to reassure his Russian counterparts | Johannes Eisele/ AFP via Getty Images Few European countries supported the Biden administration’s decision in public, highlighting a general sense of reluctance to aggravate Beijing. One of the exceptions was Estonia, where Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu, retweeting a BBC report about the balloon’s downing, said: “I support USA operation to defend its sovereignty. I fully condemn provocations jeopardising USA national security.”
Other U.S. allies did not hold back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praised the operation, tweeting “Canada strongly supports this action — we’ll keep working together … on our security and defense.”
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Park Jin, during a visit to Washington, said “I sufficiently understand the decision to postpone Secretary [Blinken]’s visit to China and I think that China should make a swift and very sincere explanation about what happened.”
Tom Tugendhat, U.K. security minister and a long-time skeptic of Beijing, called for concern over other forms of Chinese threats. “Worried about being spied on from the sky? Look at what some apps are collecting on your phone and consider your cyber security. Some risks are much closer to home,” he tweeted.
EU foreign policy in 2023 may be defined by which of these expires first: European indecision over China, or America’s appetite for providing Europe’s defense.
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Stuart Lau
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Op-ed: Oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber is the ideal person to lead the UN climate conference this year
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ABU DHABI — If the world gets lucky, this could be the year fossil fuel producers and climate activists bury their hatchets and join hands to reduce emissions and ensure our planet’s future.
If that sounds hopelessly Utopian, take that up with the leaders of this resource-rich, renewables-generating Middle Eastern monarchy. The United Arab Emirates is determined to inject specificity, urgency, and pragmatism into a process that often has lacked all three: the 28th convening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP 28, which the UAE will host from November 30 to December 12.
To kick off 2023, the oil and gas and climate communities gathered this weekend for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, launching the annual Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. After decades of mutual mistrust, there is a growing recognition they can’t live without each other.
Thank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine, and his ongoing weaponization of energy, for injecting a new dose of hard-headed reality into climate conversations. It’s seldom been so clear that energy security and cleaner energy are indivisible. The guiding principle is “the energy sustainability trilemma,” defined as the need to balance energy reliability, affordability, and sustainability.
What’s contributing to this new pragmatism is a recognition by much of the climate community that the energy transition to renewables can’t be achieved without fossil fuels, so they must be made cleaner. They have come to accept that natural gas, in particular liquified natural gas (LNG), with half the emissions footprint of coal, provides a powerful bridging fuel.
Once derided by green activists, nuclear power is also winning over new fans—particularly when it comes to the small, modular plants where there are fewer concerns over safety and weapons proliferation.
For their part, almost all major oil and gas producers, who once viewed climate activists with disdain, now embrace the reality of climate science and are investing billions of dollars in renewables and efforts to make their fossil fuels cleaner.
“Every serious hydrocarbon producer knows the future, in a world of declining use of fossil fuels, is to be low cost, low risk and low carbon,” said David Goldwyn, the former State Department special envoy for energy. “The only way to ensure we do this is to have industry at the table.”
Nowhere is this shift among climate activists more evident than in Germany, where Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, the Green Party leader, is serving as the pragmatist-in-chief.
Habeck, who serves as Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, has been the driving force behind extending the life of the country’s three nuclear plants through April and in launching Germany’s first LNG import terminal in December, with as many as five more to follow.
“I am ultimately responsible for the security of the German energy system,” Habeck told Financial Times’ reporter Guy Chazan in a sweeping profile of the German politician. “So, the buck stops with me. … I became minister to make tough decisions, not to be Germany’s most popular politician.”
Some climate activists were aghast this Thursday when the UAE named Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), as president of this year’s COP 28.
“This appointment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” said Teresa Anderson of ActionAid, a development charity. “Like last year’s summit, we’re increasingly seeing fossil fuel interests taking control of the process and shaping it to meet their own needs.”
What that overlooks is that Al Jaber’s rich background in both renewables and fossil fuels make him an ideal choice at a time when efforts to address climate change have been far too slow, lacking the inclusivity to produce more transformative results.
Al Jaber is CEO of the world’s 14th largest oil producer, but he at the same time was the founding CEO of Masdar, one of the world’s largest renewables investors, where he remains chairman. He also represents a country that despite its resource riches has become a major nuclear power producer, was the first Middle East country to join the Paris Climate Agreement and was the first Middle East country to set out a roadmap to net zero emissions by 2050.
Over the past 15 years, the UAE has invested $40 billion in renewable energy and clean tech globally. In November it signed a partnership with the United States to invest an additional $100 billion in clean energy. Some 70% of the UAE economy is generated outside the oil and gas sector, making it an exception among major producing countries in its diversification.
Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, has explained his country’s approach this way: “There will be a time, 50 years from now, when we load the last barrel of oil aboard the ship. The question is… are we going to feel sad? If our investment today is right, I think—dear brothers and sisters—we will celebrate that moment.”
Al Jaber, speaking to the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum on Saturday, captured his ambition to drive faster and more transformative results at COP 28.
“We are way off track,” said Al Jaber.
“The world is playing catchup when it comes to the key Paris goal of holding global temperatures down to 1.5 degrees,” he said. “And the hard reality is that in order to achieve this goal, global emissions must fall 43% by 2030. To add to that challenge, we must decrease emissions at a time of continued economic uncertainty, heightened geopolitical tensions and increasing pressure on energy.”
He called for “transformational progress… through game-changing partnerships, solutions and outcomes.” He said the world must triple renewable energy generation from eight terawatt hours to 23, and more than double low-carbon hydrogen production to 180 million tons for industrial sectors, which have the hardest carbon footprint to abate.
“We will work with the energy industry on accelerating the decarbonization, reducing methane, and expanding hydrogen,” said Al Jaber. “Let’s keep our focus on holding back emissions, not progress.”
If that sounds Utopian, let’s have more of it.
— Frederick Kempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.
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Who’s not coming to Davos
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DAVOS, Switzerland — The World Economic Forum’s annual conclave in the Swiss Alps is the greatest intersection of wealth and political power on the global calendar, but this year the balance is shifting.
Each January, forum organizers became used to announcing another record-setting list of national leaders, global officials and royalty making their way to the exclusive gathering.
WEF would attract even globalization’s strongest skeptics: from U.S. President Donald Trump to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.
While there are 52 heads of state of government heading to Davos this year, top-tier leaders are missing. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all giving it a miss.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to Make the Planet Great Again, is also skipping the talkfest, along with new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and re-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Instead, it’s a European-heavy guest list: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only leader from a G7 country, sharing top billing with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another German.
Even within European royal ranks, the forum this year is attracting the likes of Queen Maxima of the Netherlands — a U.N. financial inclusion envoy — rather than environmental campaigners such as King Charles and Prince William.
Some of the most prominent tech companies are dialing back their participation amid rounds of heavy layoffs.
And the biggest party hosts in town — Russian oligarchs — remain forced out by sanctions levied since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has unrivaled star wattage among the Davos crowd — but even a video appearance from him this year will be treated as below par, given how many of them he now does.
It’s the C-Suite, stupid!
With the global political elite mostly absent, WEF is this year choosing to focus on rising CEO numbers.
Among 2,700 participants in official WEF sessions, “we’re likely to surpass the old record from 2020 with 600 global CEOs — including 1,500 C-suite level overall,” said WEF’s head of digital and marketing George Schmitt, who added that 80 of the CEOs are first-timers in Davos.
Those who claim Davos is dead are yet to be proven right, but WEF’s critics now spread beyond the activist world who have long disparaged the juxtaposition of private jet opulence with hand-wringing panels about global poverty.
WEF would attract even globalization’s strongest skeptics: from U.S. President Donald Trump to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.
It’s not that Yellen has better things to do at home: She’s embarking on an 11-day trip with stops in Senegal, Zambia and South Africa, with no time for Davos.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, who campaigns to eliminate nuclear weapons, said she “genuinely had forgotten that Davos is still happening.”
“The format seems slightly dated now. The private jets and oligarch parties are no longer in step with modern biz [business] life,” said Scott Colvin, a Davos veteran who is now public affairs director at Aviva. “The events around COP [the U.N.’s annual climate summit] now feel a bigger deal, given their focus on a specific global policy objective,” he added.
WEF is a victim of its own success and stuck in a demographic bind.
The forum’s operating model requires it to provide a place for the world’s most powerful and influential people to talk.
In 2020 Bloomberg calculated 119 billionaires joined the party, with a combined net worth of more than $500 billion.
WEF’s efforts to bring the uber-elite together is a stark annual reminder that they don’t look like the rest of us.
The best ratio of female participants in WEF’s 52-year history of in-person gatherings was 24 percent, in 2020.
Despite years of exhortations and incentives for members to bring more female colleagues, the number often hovers in the range of 18 percent to 20 percent. A WEF spokesperson said that 42 percent of speakers this year will be women.
WEF aims for global reach — but often lands in the middle of the Atlantic instead.
This year Europe is supplying the most political leaders, while the U.S. corporate delegation will once again massively outweigh the others. The 700 Americans participating this year outnumber the Chinese delegation roughly 20 to 1.
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Ryan Heath
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Analysis of the top geopolitical risks facing our world in 2023
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Analysis of the top geopolitical risks facing our world in 2023 – CBS News
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Philippines’ Marcos Jr. heads to China amid sea disputes
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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. flew to China on Tuesday for a three-day state visit, saying he looks forward to his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as they work to boost bilateral ties.
“As I leave for Beijing, I will be opening a new chapter in our comprehensive, strategic cooperation with China,” he told officials and diplomats, including the Chinese ambassador, prior to boarding his flight from an air base in the capital.
“I look forward to my meeting with President Xi as we work towards shifting the trajectory of our relations to a higher gear that would hopefully bring numerous prospects and abundant opportunities for peace and development to the peoples of both our countries,” he added.
Alluding to the two countries’ territorial dispute in the South China Sea, he said he looks forward to discussing bilateral and regional political and security issues.
“The issues between our two countries are problems that do not belong between two friends such as Philippines and China,” he added. “We will seek to resolve those issues to mutual benefit of our two countries.”
China claims virtually the entire South China Sea and has ignored a 2016 ruling by a tribunal in The Hague that invalidated Beijing’s claims to the waterway. The case was brought by the Philippines, which says China has since developed disputed reefs into artificial islands with airplane runways and other structures so they now resemble forward military bases.
Most recently, a Filipino military commander reported that the Chinese coast guard forcibly seized Chinese rocket debris that Filipino navy personnel had retrieved in the South China Sea last month.
China denied the forcible seizure. Marcos said he would seek further clarification on his visit to Beijing.
Accompanied by a big business delegation, Marcos said they will seek cooperation in various areas including agriculture, energy, infrastructure, trade and investments, and people-to-people exchanges. He said they expect to sign more than 10 key bilateral agreements during the visit.
China accounts for 20% of the Philippines’ foreign trade and is also a major source of foreign direct investment.
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Xi Jinping estimates China’s 2022 GDP grew at least 4.4%. But Covid misery looms | CNN Business
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Hong Kong
CNN
—
China’s economy grew at least 4.4% in 2022, according to leader Xi Jinping, a figure much stronger than many economists had expected. But the current Covid wave may hobble growth in the months ahead.
China’s annual GDP is expected to have exceeded 120 trillion yuan ($17.4 trillion) last year, Xi said in a televised New Year’s Eve speech on Saturday. That implies growth of more than 4.4%, which is a surprisingly robust figure.
Economists had generally expected growth to slump to a rate between 2.7% and 3.3% for 2022. The government had maintained a much higher annual growth target of around 5.5%.
“China’s economy is resilient and has good potential and vitality. Its long-term fundamentals remain unchanged,” Xi said. “As long as we are confident and seek progress steadily, we will be able to achieve our goals.”
In his remarks, Xi made a rare admission of the “tough challenges” experienced by many during three years of pandemic controls. Many online commentators noted that his tone appeared softer and less self congratulatory than his New Year’s addresses over the past two years.
In 2020, Xi devoted much time to praising China’s economic achievements, highlighting that it was the first major global economy to achieve positive growth. Last year, he emphasized the country had developed rapidly and that he had won praise from his counterparts for China’s fight against Covid.
However, in 2022, China’s economy was hit by widespread Covid lockdowns and a historic property downturn. Its growth is likely to be at or below global growth for the first time in 40 years, according to Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
Chinese policymakers have vowed to seek a turnaround in 2023. They’re betting that the end of zero-Covid and a series of property support measures will revive domestic consumption and bolster growth.
But an explosion of Covid infections, triggered by the abrupt easing of pandemic restrictions in early December, is clouding the outlook. The country is battling its biggest-ever Covid outbreak.
Last week, Beijing announced it will end quarantine requirements for international arrivals from January 8, marking a major step toward reopening its borders.
The sudden end to the restrictions caught many in the country off guard and put enormous strain on the healthcare system.
The rapid spread of infections has kept many people indoors and emptied shops and restaurants. Factories have been forced to shut down or cut production because workers were getting sick.
Key data released Saturday showed factory activity in the country contracted in December by the fastest pace in nearly three years. The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slumped to 47 last month from 48 in November, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
It was the biggest drop since February 2020 and also marked the third straight month of contraction for the index. A reading below 50 indicates that activity is shrinking.
The non-manufacturing PMI, which measures activity in the services sector, plunged to 41.6 last month from 46.7 in November. It also marked the lowest level in nearly three years.
“For the next couple of months, it would be tough for China, and the impact on Chinese growth would be negative,” said Georgieva in an interview aired by CBS News on Sunday. “The impact on the region would be negative. The impact on global growth would be negative.”
Analysts are also expecting the economy to face a bumpy start in 2023 — with a likely contraction in the first quarter, as surging Covid infections dampen consumer spending and disrupt factory activity.
However, some forecast the economy will rebound after March, as people learn to live with Covid. Many investment banks now forecast China’s 2023 growth to top 5%.
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Troubles aside, Xi says China on ‘right side of history’
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BEIJING — China “stands on the right side of history,” the country’s leader Xi Jinping said Saturday in a New Year’s address that came as questions swirl over his government’s handling of COVID-19 and economic and political challenges at home and abroad.
Speaking on national television from behind a desk in a wood-paneled office, Xi largely avoided directly addressing issues confronting the country, pointing instead to successes in agricultural production, poverty elimination and its hosting of the Winter Olympics in February.
However, he later turned somewhat obliquely to the challenges facing the world’s most populous country and second-largest economy, saying, “The world is not at peace.”
China will “always steadfastly advocate for peace and development … and unswervingly stands on the right side of history,” he said.
Recent weeks have seen street protests against Xi’s government, the first facing the ruling Communist Party in more than three decades.
Xi’s speech follows a stunning U-turn on China’s hard-line COVID-19 containment policy that has sparked a massive surge in infections and demands from the U.S. and others for travelers from China to prove they aren’t infected.
Meanwhile, the economy is fighting its way out of the doldrums, spurring rising unemployment, while ties with the U.S. and other major nations are at historic lows.
Setting aside their uncertainty, people in Beijing and other cities have returned to work, shopping areas and restaurants, with consumers preparing for January’s Lunar New Year holiday, the most significant in the Chinese calendar.
Xi, who is also head of the increasingly powerful armed forces, was in October given a third five-year term as head of the almost 97 million-member Communist Party.
Having sidelined potential rivals and eliminated all limits on his terms in office, he could potentially serve as China’s leader for the rest of his life.
China has also come under pressure for its continued support for Russia, and on Friday, Xi held a virtual meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which he was quoted as describing the events in Ukraine as a “crisis.”
The term marked a departure from China’s usual references to the “Ukraine situation,” and the change may reflect growing Chinese concern about the direction of the conflict.
Still, in his remarks to Putin, Xi was careful to reiterate Chinese support for Moscow. China has pledged a “no limits” friendship with Russia and hasn’t blamed Putin for the conflict, while attacking the U.S. and NATO and condemning punishing economic sanctions imposed on Russia.
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Hong Kong leader aims to reopen border with China next month
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HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s leader said Saturday that China has agreed to a reopening of the city’s border with the mainland, which has been largely closed by pandemic restrictions, and that he is aiming for a mid-January start.
Chief Executive John Lee, returning from a trip to Beijing where he met President Xi Jinping and other officials, told reporters at the Hong Kong airport that the two sides would develop a plan to reopen the border in a gradual and orderly manner.
The announcement came as China is easing a “zero-COVID” policy that has restricted entry to the country, isolated infected people and locked down areas with outbreaks.
Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Chinese territory that borders Guangdong province in southeast China. People must pass through immigration to cross between the two, and most land and sea entry points have been closed and controls tightened because of the pandemic.
Lee has made a full reopening of the border a priority to boost the city’s flagging economy. The issue was one of several on his agenda for this week’s trip to Beijing to deliver an annual report to the central government, his first such report since taking office on July 1.
He offered no details on how the border might be reopened, and whether it would include an elimination of the five days of hotel quarantine required for people entering mainland China.
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