The White House on Feb. 3 said it was “keeping all options on the table” in relation to a Chinese spy balloon traveling across the United States.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden was briefed on the balloon flight on Tuesday, and a senior defense official previously said it was the “strong recommendation” of military leadership not to shoot down the balloon “because of risk to safety and security of the people on the ground.”
“The president will always put the safety and security of the American people first,” Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday. “We are tracking closely and keeping all options on the table.”
The U.S. military is currently tracking the spy balloon which is currently in the center of the country hovering eastward, and the administration has canceled a planned trip of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing this weekend in response.
At a news conference with South Korea’s visiting foreign minister later on Friday, Blinken said he had told Wang Yi, director of China’s Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, that the incident on the eve of his trip was an “irresponsible act” by China, but Washington remained committed to engagement and he would visit when conditions allowed.
“[China’s] decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have,” he said.
Blinken said he was not going to put a date on when he might go to China and the focus was on resolving the current incident. “The first step is ... getting the surveillance asset, out of our air space,” he said, adding that the United States would continue to maintain open lines of communication with China.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, has claimed that the balloon is a civilian meteorological device that “deviated far from its planned course.”
“Clearly the intent of this balloon is for surveillance,” a senior defense official said on Thursday. “The current flight path does carry it over a number of sensitive sites.”
The balloon flew from China, then to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and through northwest Canada before arriving somewhere in Montana on Wednesday, according to reports. Montana is one of three homes for U.S. nuclear strategic silos.
A senior defense official said that on Wednesday the U.S. prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot down the balloon if ordered. The Pentagon ultimately recommended against it, noting that even as the balloon was over a sparsely populated area of Montana, its size would create a debris field large enough that it could have put people at risk.
While spy balloons have entered U.S. airspace several times over the past years, this balloon has stayed for longer, the defense official said.
The incident has caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, where countering the CCP’s continued espionage against the United States remains one of the few bipartisan priorities in Congress.
Many Republican figures have called on the administration to shoot down the balloon.
The Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul (Texas), said the balloon should never have been allowed in U.S. airspace and could have been shot down over water.
“I am calling on the Biden administration to quickly take steps to remove the Chinese spy balloon from U.S. airspace,” he said in a statement.
In a joint statement on Feb. 2, Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House select committee on the CCP, and the panel’s ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), used the incident to underscore the threat posed to the United States by the CCP.
“The Chinese Communist Party should not have on-demand access to American airspace,” the statement said. “Not only is this a violation of American sovereignty, coming only days before Secretary Blinken’s trip to [China], but it also makes clear that the CCP’s recent diplomatic overtures do not represent a substantive change in policy.”
“Indeed, this incident demonstrates that the CCP threat is not confined to distant shores—it is here at home and we must act to counter this threat.”
