Balloon burst hopes for US-China trust-building. What now?

A rare opportunity for the United States and China to revive critical dialogues blew up in a plume of smoke this weekend as a U.S. Air Force jet downed a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said China’s government was using the balloon, which had traversed American territory for seven days, “to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States.” Beijing, claiming the balloon was a civilian airship used primarily for meteorological research and blown off course and into the U.S. by “accident,” protested the U.S. strike as “a clear overreaction.”

Regardless of the balloon’s mission, the crisis was exacerbated by a failure of real-time communication