The Americans have finally shot down the Chinese balloon over the surging waters of the sea. As Washington puts it, the balloon was engaged in a surveillance of US defence installations, having made its way from Alaska through Canada and hovering over important military points along its trajectory.
The Chinese authorities, indignant at the American position on the balloon affair, have insisted all along that the balloon had everything to do with studying weather patterns and had simply been blown off course from its original position. And that is where conditions stand at this point, with Washington and Beijing looking eyeball to eyeball over the affair.
The balloon affair is but one more hint of the new Cold War gripping the world's powerful nations, especially in light of the coronavirus outbreak of three years ago. Added to that is the year-long war which has been going on in and around Ukraine, thanks to President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade the country as a means of halting its slide into such western alliances as Nato and the European Union.
The plain fact is that the Russians are caught in a situation where they have not lost the war nor have they won it. As for the West, and that refers to the Biden administration's ceaseless moves toward arming the government of President Volodymir Zelensky with weaponry calculated to keep the Russians at bay, it appears to have lost its way in Ukraine. And with the Americans are allied all twenty-seven members, as also Britain, of the EU. Ursula von der Leyen and her colleagues made a great show of expressing solidarity with Zelensky when they travelled to Kyiv last week, ostensibly as a move toward reassuring Ukrainians that membership of the EU is the reward they will soon have.
And now, with the Chinese balloon having made its way across the American landscape, circumstances get to acquire a darker meaning. President Xi Jinping is not the Chinese leader willing to reach out to the West in a spirit of accommodation of the kind which earlier defined US-China relations. In recent years, with the West berating China over the supposed origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, ties between western and Chinese politicians have become fraught.
The decision by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to not go on a scheduled visit to Beijing as a consequence of the balloon episode is proof of the steep slide in Washington-Beijing ties. It is all a reminder of the times when a planned summit between US President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was torpedoed through the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet territory. The plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, had taken off from an American base in Pakistan's Peshawar. The episode simply muddied the waters. It would take long years before Moscow and Washington would speak to each other again.
Incidents in the 1960s --- think here of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 --- only intensified the nature of the Cold War in that pre-détente era. For thirteen days the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war, given that neither Khrushchev nor President Kennedy appeared ready to blink. But a point came when they both blinked, with the Soviets willing to take back their missiles from Cuba and the Americans withdrawing their own base in Turkey.
The Cold War today is certainly not the Cold War of yesterday, but the noises are patently similar. Again, changed realities, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, have given a new dimension to the crisis assailing the globe today. China, for years in the 1950s and 1960s ridiculed as Red China by policymakers in Washington, patiently waited for America to come to it. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ended up travelling to Beijing in the early 1970s.
Much interaction between China and the US, beginning with what would come to be known as ping-pong diplomacy, has since the Nixon visit to Beijing taken place. Chinese leaders, among whom was Deng Xiao-ping, have been to the US. Thousands of Chinese students study at American universities; and thousands of Americans, business people as well as tourists, are constantly making a bee line for Beijing.
That looks like an encouraging picture, but when one considers the crisis that has come into trade between the Americans and the Chinese, one spots the underlying tension in the relationship.
The Chinese have been forcing their way into the world's diverse regions, primarily through offering financial assistance to nations in Africa and Asia. Western analysts of Chinese policy have consistently drawn attention to the debt trap Africa has fallen into through its happy acceptance of huge infusions of Chinese aid. Given what has happened around Sri Lanka's Hambantota port and what could be happening to and in Pakistan over CPEC, the worries appear plausible.
Overall, however, the picture is revealing. China has emerged as a major global economic power and is poised to overtake America as the world's largest economy by 2030. Militarily it has been flexing its muscles around Taiwan, the breakaway province it would want to return to the mainland. Over the Spratly Islands, Beijing has not budged from its position.
And now that organisations like Quad have emerged and Washington is urging nations in the Asia-Pacific region to be part of a formation which clearly is directed at containing China --- and that is a throwback to the times when containing China and containing Communism was a western policy plank to be practised through SEATO and CENTO --- the new Cold War assumes a bleaker hue.
Which takes us back to the balloon episode. American surveillance of Chinese installations over the years has riled the leadership in Beijing, which is therefore angry at the US response to the balloon affair. The US military has shot down the balloon, but that is not the end of the crisis. If anything, the crisis has only been exacerbated. Tensions generated by the balloon can only be defused through both sides stepping back a little and agreeing to negotiate the future of US-China ties in good faith.
Washington cannot afford to get into a deeper crisis with China when it has its hands full in Ukraine. In similar manner, Beijing should come forth in all transparency where its policy toward the West and indeed the rest of the globe is concerned. Belligerency drills holes in inter-state relations. And a Cold War, as was observed in the 1950s and 1960s, leaves societies mired in newer, graver crises.
New balloons symbolic of global cooperation need to go up in the sky.
