![]() ![]() ![]() “The administration failed to protect our border and now has failed to protect our skies,” Daines tweeted. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) sent a letter to the Pentagon Thursday night demanding answers about the balloon after it was spotted in Montana, where a major air force base, Malmstrom Air Force Base, houses nuclear missiles. “We’re not going to do it in a way that’s going to fall on a major city and kill anyone … we have to make that pretty clear.” “If these things are flying over our airspace, and there’s an opportunity to bring them down, we’re going to do it,” Rubio said. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a Friday appearance on “The Mike Gallagher Show” that it was “disappointing” the Pentagon “chose not to bring it down when it was over a sparsely populated area where they could have retrieved it.” Republicans quickly seized on the Chinese balloon’s intrusion to hammer the Biden administration, accusing the Pentagon and President Biden of being soft on China. Marco Rubio, have criticized President Biden’s response to the Chinese balloon incident. “They’re pushing us to see how we will respond.” Republicans hammer Biden’s response to balloon “It’s the Chinese screwing with us,” he said. Jim Townsend, who served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy during the Obama administration, described the Chinese surveillance balloon as operating in a “gray area” of conflict - activities security analysts describe as being provocative and disruptive, but below the threshold of kinetic military activity, challenging how the target can mount a proportional response. militarily, technologically and economically. and Chinese military confrontation over Taiwan, where Washington fears Beijing is preparing an invasion of the self-ruled island within the next few years.Ĭhina has sided with Russia amid its military assault on Ukraine, has expanded its nuclear weapons stockpile and is generally seen as holding ambitions to overtake the U.S. The two powers are locked in an intense geopolitical rivalry, and that’s both the reason we need effective diplomatic engagement, and simultaneously, the major obstacle to those channels working effectively to avoid competition from spiraling out of control,” he said.Īmong the most immediate concerns is avoiding a U.S. “I think this incident tells us what we already knew about the state of the U.S.-China relationship. The discovery is a severe incident, said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, and one that is testing how the U.S. The Pentagon would not confirm that the balloon in the photo was the surveillance balloon. Some say the Chinese spy balloon is significantĪ high altitude balloon floats over Billings, Mont., on Wednesday, Feb. Beijing said it regretted this had happened. skies, calling it a serious security breach.Īnd from China, there was a sense of chagrin, with the nation issuing a statement accepting responsibility for a private balloon flying into U.S. Republicans in Congress slammed both China and the administration over the fact that the balloon had made it into U.S. officials across the Departments of State and Defense lodged complaints with their Chinese counterparts, underscoring the anger across the Biden administration.
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