Cold-war lessons from China’s spy balloon

There was something almost comic about the immense Chinese balloon, carrying equipment the size of a small passenger plane, that drifted over America for days until it was popped on February 4th by an American fighter jet. As cold-war-type moments go, it was light relief compared with, say, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or the crash-landing in 2001 of an American spyplane after a Chinese fighter collided with it. But this was no joke. America said the balloon was spying. For ordinary Americans, the threat from China was suddenly visible, overhead. In his state-of-the-union speech on February 7th, President Joe Biden warned: “make no mistake about it…if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”