https://www.clarin.com/mundo/china-unidos-guerra-globos-levedad-diplomatica_0_yTFFeyKeRM.html

A Chinese balloon flies over the United States and, immediately, inside the two powers paint their faces and show their nails. The episode has extravagant flavours, and perhaps precisely for this reason it symbolizes in an extraordinary way the precariousness of the diplomacy of the time.

An observation that is aggravated against the background of medieval warfare which Russia launched against Ukraine a year ago for no reason, which is brutal but also extravagant.

Difficult not to combine these two episodes to x-ray a period of enormous danger, even if not only because of the sharp rivalry between the two major planetary powers, but for the lightness they exhibit.

Balloons like the ones that have filled the pages of newspapers around the world in these hours have always existed. Many of these devices They flew slowly over the United States during the Donald Trump administration or before without anyone seemingly knowing or, more significantly, caring.

Washington has generally been more practical when it comes to observing what its rival is doing: it sends its military planes to fly over the limits of Chinese space, or its ships to sail off its coasts, an audacity that, for now, the People’s Republic not allowed with Western power. Its satellites would have sufficed.

The back room of this story the sainete certainly prowls. Even ufologists have intervened to give their opinion and the White House is forced to clarify, amid the smiles of the BBC in London, that it does not rule out an extraterrestrial presence, while admitting that for the moment no clues have been found about that alternative.

It happens that it is at least ridiculous Suppose China monitors US secret military installations by means of a clearly visible, gigantic object slowly traversing US airspace. So if it’s not a Martian UFO, it’s possible to assume that it was indeed a traveling weather balloon, as the Chinese claimed.

The Pentagon threat level immediately removed the initial object of this saga, later shot down by the US Air Force. In this direction, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an analysis body linked to the US intelligence community, has assessed that “the most probable explanation is that it is a weather balloon which is lost; Lost weather balloons are the basis for many UFO sightings.

That reasoning has a limit. In that case, China should have identified those responsible for the failure, they informed the United States in time. and closed the dispute. It escapes no one that there is a political content in this crisis that goes beyond its certain caricatural character.

The mere appearance of this object froze the strategic rapprochement that had taken place between the two powers. That movement, which was built on top of the enormous mutual distrust, Not so much because of the need for a historic, permanent and mature change in the binational bond as because of the need to react to an explosive situation in the world economy.

dangerous competition

The United States and China have been intensifying their competition for planetary hegemony for years. This shock slowed down the dynamics of the storage system. The axis of rivalry is the scientific avant-garde, a territory in which Beijing shows significant progress.

What the West has been looking for, at best, is delay that evolution until something happens that can stop it. China has concentrated, in turn, on dodging with some success those obstacles that lie behind its project of absolute autonomy.

But the global economic crisis is interfering with these strategies and I would recommend a pause in the battle. According to the United Nations, based on data from international organizations, global growth will slow from 3% expected in 2022 to 1.9% in 2023. They’re narrowing the markets… for everyone.

This trend can be alleviated if the two major capitalist powers of the time catch up some kind of coordination in line with the request that the IMF and the World Bank had already made since before the pandemic regarding the urgency of setting limits to the rivalry of two extremely interconnected and mutually dependent structures.

In large measure, this was Joe Biden’s mission and here’s why Wall Street funded his campaign. But the US president still circulates between the mazes of the Cold War and China, for his part, has faced feed all kinds of paranoia with the aggressive policies brought by Xi Jinping’s leadership and with the lash of prudence recommended by Deng Xiaoping. Levite.

However, the gloomy and uncertain situation forced Beijing to do so accept a lot of setbacks. Among them, he had to dismantle the zero Covid policy that strangled his economy and which he used as a tool of internal control due to the social concern that was driving the decline in growth.

The effect, as is known, was even more explosive than what was intended to be contained by triggering an unprecedented multiplication of strikes and street protests. That was a particularly complex scene questioned the executive quality of Xi’s management sometimes where he concentrated total decision-making power and turned his chair into a perpetual mandate.

A crucial part of these mutations was the large three-hour meeting Xi held with Biden in Bali during the G20 summit. The result of that historic meeting, wanted by both sides, was replacing veteran Foreign Minister Wang Yifor nine years responsible for the international policy of the Asian giant.

In his place the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang, a diplomat respected by the leaders of US power; specializing in central Europe and with a previous mission in London.

The United States, in turn, confirmed in that dialogue the trip to Beijing by the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, the first visit by that hierarchy in five years. To these handful of gestures, Beijing added the Chinese president’s reluctance to accept the insistent invitation of his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin for an official meeting in Fly.

“The Chinese enjoyed Blinken’s visit because they really want to work with the US to improve the relationship especially since Their priority is economic recovery.” explains Yun Sun, director of the Stimson Center’s China program and well-known expert on the foreign policy of the People’s Republic and its ties with Washington.

Chinese intern?

But the balloon appeared and all that delicate assembly dissolved. Blinken suspended his journey and détente froze. Does this make sense? One wonders what this episode reveals about what really goes on in the bowels of Chinese power.

As the aforementioned US Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, the balloon was certainly meteorological, but not necessarily a naive player.

It is clear, it is assumed also for the Chinese nomenklatura, that if a mysterious device appears flying over in full view a state like Montana with missile bases and days after the hard-beaten Republicans in the midterm elections were to appoint the new head of the House of Representatives, there would be domestic political pressure.

The episode was humiliating for the democratic government. Biden had no other solution than a gesture of hardness and that’s why he knocked down the ball, an order he later repeated against any other foreign aircraft that appeared on his territory or that of Canada. Signals to disarm the opposition. China was able to predict and anticipate this.

The conspiracy versions claim that the device was mechanically moved towards the North American sky. And that it was flying suspiciously too low for the heights required for any meteorological exploration. There is no clarity about it, but the truth is that it has achieved an immediate effect for complicate the Chinese president’s rather public strategy.

If this was the case, it would explain the lack of empathy on the part of the People’s Republic, which seemed to react to the episode with the same surprise compared to her American counterpart who blames her for the crash and threatens reprisals.

Also denouncing the appearance of balloons here and there. A tactic against the inevitable fact of the cooling of relations which places the initiative to a certain extent on the side of the United States, but, moreover, to try to dispel any suspicions about the existence of a challenge to the authority of the Chinese government who are dangerously behind this telenovela.
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