WASHINGTON — The Chinese balloon that floated across the United States this month, apparently on a mission to collect intelligence, began its journey as a curiosity. Then it became a political metaphor: a symbol of U.S. weakness to Republicans, a sign of President Joe Biden’s prudence to Democrats.
Now, more than a week after the U.S. Air Force shot it down, the errant balloon is gone, but its impact is still reverberating.
The incident, and the larger Chinese program it revealed, is a serious obstacle to one of Biden’s top foreign policy goals: stabilizing the prickly U.S. relationship with Beijing.
