Array
China expressed outrage Sunday over the U.S. military’s shooting down a day earlier of a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, as the Navy began retrieving the wreckage from the Atlantic Ocean and the political rhetoric ramped up in Washington.
Fallout from the balloon incident, which some are describing as a dangerous turning point in an evolving new Cold War between America and China, rocked the national security community through the weekend, with the Pentagon confirming the discovery of a second balloon floating over Latin America.
While Beijing has yet to acknowledge a second, giant white orb spotted roughly 60,000 feet over Costa Rica, Chinese officials accused Washington of acting irrationally by dispatching U.S. fighter jets to shoot down the first spy craft discovered at a similar altitude over the U.S. last week.
“The U.S. use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that Beijing “reserves the right to make further responses if necessary.”
With uncertainty coursing over what may come next, domestic politics tied to the incident turned biting Sunday, with Democrats accusing Republicans of hypocrisy for criticizing President Biden’s handling of the situation just days before he delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Mr. Biden waited several days before ordering Saturday’s shootdown of the balloon that analysts say was outfitted with some 700 pounds of high-tech surveillance equipment. The spy craft was allowed to fly across a large swath of the United States, soaking up imagery and other intelligence, before being punctured some six miles off South Carolina’s coast by what some reports described as a heat-seeking missile from an F-22 fighter.
Sen. Cory Booker cited claims by the Biden administration that other Chinese spy balloons had been spotted over U.S. territory in recent years, including during the Trump administration, which had apparently decided not to shoot the surveillance vehicles out of the sky.
“It’s problematic for a Democrat or Republican to have one standard for one president, another standard for another president,” the New Jersey Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, claiming that “this is now known to have happened under the Trump administration multiple times.”
His allegations came amid reports that House Republicans are readying a resolution to criticize Mr. Biden’s response to the balloon, while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell upped the GOP’s condemnation of the president’s decision to allow the spy craft to travel over several sensitive national security sites, including Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force base, which is home to one of the U.S. military’s three nuclear missile silo fields.
“As usual when it comes to national defense and foreign policy, the Biden administration reacted at first too indecisively and then too late,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement. “We should not have let the People’s Republic of China make a mockery of our airspace.
