Thursday, February 9, 2023

 Terry Payne submits:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-disturbing-truth-behind-chinas-spy-balloon-
penetration/


FRONTPAGE
MAG

The Disturbing Truth Behind China's Spy Balloon Penetration


The motives and the significance - and why it's happening now.

February 7, 2023 by Scott S. Powell
<https://www.frontpagemag.com/author/scott-s-powell/>




What are the motives and significance of the Chinese spy balloon penetration
of U.S. territory, and why now? First the backstory:
China's military capability may soon rival that of the United States. What
holds back Chinese President Xi Jinping from moving militarily on Taiwan are
two things:  First he may think that time is on his side, with Biden's
America in decline and a perception that a two-year window remains for
action. Second, what holds Xi Jinping back is of course his concern that if
the invasion fails, he would be removed by the CCP.
So, Xi continues to build Chinese military power capabilities while the U.S.
deteriorates, and he bides his time while studying and calculating the range
of responses from the U.S. that China would face from such an invasion.
The Chinese projection of power against the United States is shaped by two
priorities. First, is their commitment to what is known as unrestricted
warfare, one part of which emphasizes using multinational, non-state, and
supranational organizations to counter the U.S. Toward this end, the Chinese
now control the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO), which provides China
with a proxy front to impose an unprecedented medical tyranny far exceeding
the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and controls. The second priority is the
age-old Chinese military strategy that emphasizes  "the supreme excellence
of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." Even if the Chinese
cannot match the U.S. military because of U.S. export controls on high-end
semiconductors and advanced AI technology, Beijing believes their level of
control in the U.S. can continue America's demoralization and
division-potentially leading to collapse. Said another way, China is
delaying military action in hopes of breaking America without fighting.
As for engaging the U.S. militarily, Xi and his advisors study America's
past. They know the U.S. military's masterful logistics can deliver swift
and decisive enemy defeat, such as the Bush administration's victory in the
Gulf War in 1990-1991. But the Chinese also note the fecklessness of the
Clinton and Obama administrations that followed, in which two U.S. embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed;  Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak was
abandoned; the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya was destroyed,
and ISIS appeared invincible after two and a half years of U.S. military
engagement.
After Trump became president in January 2017 the Chinese witnessed a
dramatic reversal. Within about a month of taking office Trump unleashed
American power that decimated ISIS within weeks. A month later Trump ordered
a strike of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles that took out Syria's air force. And
in early 2020 Trump authorized a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem
Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the number
two leader Iran.
Everything changed with the 2020 election-characterized by massive voting
irregularities-that displaced Trump and delivered Joe Biden as U.S.
President. What most voters didn't know, but Xi Jinping did know, was that
Biden was a compromised president. The Biden family had received-in prior
years leading up to the election-tens of millions of dollars from Chinese
business deals, and the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at
the University of Pennsylvania had received $70 million from sources in
China.
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, a brilliant lawyer and the
most successful prosecutor of the Mafia who conducted a forensic analysis of
the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, described the Biden Family as
being "owned by the Chinese Communist Party," and Joe Biden himself as being
"in partnership with the Chinese Communist Party."
The weakness Biden signaled as President, characterized by his inexplicable
decision to abruptly withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving behind some $80
billion of advanced U.S. military equipment and abandoning the strategically
located Bagram Air Base was naturally encouraging for Xi. Biden's top
military generals, Secretary  Lloyd Austin and Joint Chief General Mark
Milley, who were involved in the Afghanistan decision-making fiasco, have
also originated other harmful leadership initiatives, such as universal
mandatory Covid-19 vaccination requirements and obligatory Critical Race
Theory indoctrination for the officer corps and the enlistees in all
military branches-both of which policies significantly added to the
demoralization of the military-resulting in recruiting shortfalls-with all
of it being observed and digested by the Chinese leadership.
Xi's authorization of launching a spy balloon and have it fly over a broad
swath of the United States, and hover over sensitive areas to collect
intelligence data where nuclear warheads are siloed, was also intended to
accomplish several important objectives for the Chinese:
First, the Chinese penetration by a spy balloon of U.S. territory succeeded
in publicly humiliating America-reinforcing the lesson of Afghanistan to
allies such as Taiwan-that the United States is unreliable-lacking courage
and a comprehensive strategy to defend its own territory.
Second, the spy balloon was likely used to test America's ability to detect
incoming threats and to find holes in the country's air defense warning
system. The spy balloon first came into U.S. airspace over the sparsely
populated Alaskan Aleutian Islands on January 28, where the U.S. military
should have blown it out of the sky. Perhaps there's a hole, as there was no
response nor any scrambling of U.S. fighter jets.
Third, Beijing could see Biden's weakness and willingness to defer power to
subordinates in the response to his order to shoot the spy satellite down
three days later, February 1st, when it entered Montana airspace. After
giving the order, Biden passed the buck to military advisors who said "wait
till the balloon crosses the country and gets to the Atlantic"-all of which
prolonged the nation's humiliation and demonstrated a fundamentally flawed
decision-making process, which Beijing was no doubt testing. Said another
way, Xi wanted to reconfirm Milley's deference to China, which Milley had
previously demonstrated twice in communicating critical national security
information to Chinese leaders in December and January 2020-2021, without
President Trump's knowledge or consent.
All of this is the consequence of corruption and the 2020 election
irregularity.
*************************************
Scott Powell is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger China and
senior fellow at Discovery Institute. His recent book, Rediscovering
America, was #1 new release in history for eight straight weeks at Amazon
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org
<mailto:scottp@discovery.org> .

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