Morning World: UFOs spell trouble for superpower relations
Welcome to Morning World, the (weekly for now) newsletter helping Reaction readers make sense of geopolitics, security and defence.
In July 1947, a US military balloon crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.
The event sparked one of the most famous, exhaustively investigated, and thoroughly debunked UFO conspiracies of all time.
The idea that the government had covered up the discovery of alien life in a crashed spaceship caught hold in the 70s and inserted a long metal probe into popular consciousness.
Seventy-five years after Roswell, another balloon, a white speck first spotted hovering high over Montana, has caused a similar stir.
The mysterious object flew over several US nuclear missile sites before it was shot down over the Atlantic on 4 February, pulled out of the sea off the coast of South Carolina and taken – X-Files style – to the FBI lab at Quantico, Virginia to be pored over by military experts. Three more unidentified flying objects have since been shot down over North America but are yet to be recovered.
Like Roswell, the bizarre balloon debacle is fuelling paranoia – this time between rival superpowers.
Tip of the iceberg
Washington claims that the object is a Chinese surveillance balloon, and intelligence officials believe it’s part of an extensive espionage programme. “We know these PRC [People’s Liberation Army] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world,” said John Kirby, spokesman for Joe Biden’s National Security Council.
China is thought to have been toying with balloon technology for years. A 2020 article published in People’s Liberation Army Daily – the Chinese military’s main newspaper – urged officers to take balloons seriously, and described how military scientists had been working on new designs and navigation tools to make models more durable and harder to detect. “Near space,” the authors wrote, “has become a new battleground in modern warfare.”
As Gabriel Gavin writes on Reaction, the balloon incident is a window into a covert intelligence-gathering battle between Washington and Beijing – a new cold war above the clouds.
Pop go relations
While countries spying on each other in innovative ways is nothing new, being caught red-handed is deeply embarrassing for Beijing.
For one thing, President Xi Jinping is trying to sell the idea of an alternative security architecture to countries that haven’t yet hitched their wagon to the US or China. This Chinese-led “Global Security Initiative” is meant to prioritise the sovereignty and interconnected security of developing countries, in contrast to US adventurism and exploitation. Evidence that China violates other nations’ airspace to snoop on them blows a hole in Xi’s story.
Bad blood over the balloon also threatens to burn the few bridges that remain intact between the US and China. As Tim Marshall notes in his latest column, the popped balloon has already put the kibosh on a rare high-profile diplomatic visit. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s cancelled trip to Beijing is a missed opportunity to build “guardrails” to stop crises between the two superpowers spiralling out of control.
Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, has said the US-China relationship is now at its lowest ebb since before Ricard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China which opened up the nascent power to the West.
Even Washington and Beijing’s pragmatic cooperation over trade may be under threat. “The economic relationship is becoming politicised and trust is plummeting to zero,” Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, told the BBC. “This whole balloon conversation demonstrates that there is no trust in that relationship now.”
As geopolitical repercussions go, the arrival of little green men may have been a simpler problem to solve.
Mattie Brignal, Defence Editor