The U.S. loves sending secretive "objects" into other countries
It's only a crisis if they shoot back, or send their own spy balloons into America.
The appearance of a high-tech Chinese balloon over Montana earlier this month set off a days-long media frenzy. Since then, North American air defense units have been on extra-high alert, announcing the discovery and destruction of some new unknown “object” several days in a row. Officials speculate that the “objects” are part of Chinese, Russian, or other foreign attempts to probe U.S. defensive capabilities.
Foreign Policy columnist Howard French warns that American officialdom and society have “overreacted” to the intrusions.
“Americans have not been used to being systemically challenged by anything like a peer competitor since the demise of the Soviet Union — and I, for one, find China’s willingness to exhibit its colors to be healthier and more manageable than the previous era of camouflaged ambitions was,” he writes. “It is the United States’ recent response, frankly, that worries me more.”
Perhaps French has it backwards. Americans have every right to be concerned about the Chinese or Russian military poking into American airspace. At the same time, American media should probably take this opportunity to reflect on what it feels like to be in the shadow of a great power, and whether U.S. actions towards weaker nations have been entirely level-headed.
Over the past few decades, several U.S. surveillance missions have caused serious international crises — because the targeted countries dared to shoot back. U.S. leaders have threatened to go to war to defend their right to do roughly the same thing China is accused of doing, sometimes under far more tense circumstances.
Probably the closest the world came to nuclear war was the Cuban missile crisis. After the United States threatened an invasion of Cuba in 1962 to roll back the Cuban revolution, the Soviet Union responded by putting nuclear-armed forces on the island. As the crisis escalated, the U.S. military flew surveillance planes over Cuba, and Soviet officials urged increasingly-antsy Cuban troops not to fire on the intruders.
In the words of Defense Department advisor Daniel Ellsberg, the spyplanes were “crisscrossing the island every two hours, producing sonic booms and causing general panic.” Keep in mind, U.S. planes had bombed Cuba during the Bay of Pigs incident the previous year.
On October 27, 1962, commanders on the ground finally lost their nerve. Cuban and Soviet forces began firing on U.S. surveillance planes, and downed a high-tech U-2 spyplane, killing a pilot. Everyone agreed that the plane had been penetrating Cuban airspace, but U.S. leaders took the incident as a Soviet escalation, because the Communists drew “first blood.”

In his 2017 memoir, The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg recalled a conversation with then-attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy:
He told me, in more detail than was made public in his memoir, that at the direction of his brother, on the evening of Saturday, October 27, 1962, he began a secret discussion at the Justice Department with [Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin] by impressing on him the serious implications of the attacks that day on American reconnaissance aircraft.
“I said, ‘You have drawn first blood, and that’s a very serious matter,’ ” he told me he had said to Dobrynin. “I said the president had decided against advice—strongly from the military, but not only the military—not to respond militarily to that attack, but he [Dobrynin] should know that if another plane was shot at, we would shoot back.… I said we would be continuing to fly reconnaissance missions over Cuba—we had to. The shooting had to stop. If one more plane was shot at, we wouldn’t just attack the site that had fired at it; we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft and probably all the missiles. And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”
I asked Kennedy, “Did you name a deadline?”
He said, “Yes. Forty-eight hours.”
“I wanted to be sure I understood. “So he was giving them forty-eight hours—”
He cut in right away, correcting me. He said, “Unless they shot a plane sooner, in which case we would go right away.”
“So there were two separate threats, or warnings,” I said. “They had just two days to start removing the missiles or we would remove them. That’s if no more planes were shot at, or shot down. But if we lost another plane, the attack would start immediately, right after that.”
He said, “That’s right.”
After Kennedy returned from his meeting, his brother ordered 24 troop-carrier squadrons to prepare for an invasion. In other words, Washington was willing to attack Soviet nuclear forces in order defend the American right to menace a different country with military jets.
At this point, Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev started to back down. Krushchev’s son later told Ellsberg that the Soviet leader was worried about losing control of his forces to Cuban commander-in-chief Fidel Castro. The shootdown of the U-2 had been explicitly against Soviet orders.
This crisis is often taught to American schoolchildren as an example of Kennedy’s coolheadedness and steady hand.

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself twice: first as tragedy, and then as farce.
In mid-2018, the United States launched a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at toppling the Iranian government. Iran responded with sabotage attacks against oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, kicking off a game of chicken. Thousands of U.S. troops arrived in the region and Washington reviewed its war plans.
On June 20, 2019, the Iranian military shot down a $150 million U.S. surveillance drone. Iran claimed that the drone was in its airspace, while Washington argued that it was actually over international waters. To avenge the honor of the unmanned robot, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to strike Iranian missile batteries. U.S. officials estimated that the raid would kill 150 people on Iranian soil.
American hawks had been urging this kind of reaction for awhile. In 2011, a U.S. drone came down, or was possibly brought down, over Iranian territory. That time, there was no pretense about “international waters,” because the drone was found hundreds of kilometers inside the country. Former vice president Dick Cheney publicly urged the Obama administration to respond by bombing Iran.
Trump cancelled the airstrikes, mainly because Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked him out of it. Instead, the U.S. military launched cyberattacks to disrupt Iranian antiaircraft systems. Messing with another country’s air defenses can itself be understood as a violent threat — as the reaction to potential Chinese probing shows.
After the shootdown of its balloon last week, China responded by accusing the United States of illegally overflying Chinese territory with balloons several times in the past. That would be consistent with past U.S. behavior. Then again, China has its own strange definition of words like “territory” and “sovereignty.”

What will they claim next? An entire hemisphere?
There was an old Soviet joke: “In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, ‘Down with Ronald Reagan,’ and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, ‘Down with Ronald Reagan,’ and you will not be punished.”
I propose a 2023 update to the joke. America is very good at reflecting on the consequences of its actions — as long as someone else is doing them.
China has its own strange definition of words like “territory” and “sovereignty.”
Much less strange than America's, and much more modest.
It is unbelievable as well as frightening just how close the United States brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation by the power of its immense arrogance. To give a 48 hour ultimatum to a nuclear power is the most outrageously irresponsible act by a US president. The Soviets could have stood their ground, forcing the US to commit the most heinous crime imaginable against the whole of humanity. In that case, would the US have gone ahead and started World War 3? I'm afraid it is not easy to answer that question, but it is quite scary to ponder upon it.