Republican Senator Mitt Romney has defended Joe Biden’s response to the Chinese surveillance balloon incident, breaking from a party eager to admonish the administration with allegations that the president is ill-equipped to stand up against China.
Following a series of briefings from military officials, including a classified hearing on China’s surveillance operations, the senator from Utah said he “came away more confident” in the Biden administration’s response.
“I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju on 9 February.
“Was everything done 100 per cent correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do,” he added. “But I came away more confident.”
Congressional Republicans have been eager to cast the president as a weak and malleable foil to China’s aggression, seizing on the balloon’s appearance as evidence of Mr Biden’s failures.
In his remarks to a Senate subcommittee addressing the balloon incident, Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester said he has been “discouraged by some of the responses from elected officials in the House and Senate who decided this was a great opportunity to score some cheap political points and get attention on social media.”
The White House directed the military to review options for shooting down the balloon when it was first briefed on its appearance in US airspace last week. “I told the Defense Department I wanted to shoot it down as soon as it was appropriate,” Mr Biden told reporters this week.
Military officials, however, advised against shooting the balloon while it was still over land because of the threats posed from falling debris that would rain down from several thousand feet in the sky.
A US Air Force F-22 Raptor shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday after the balloon reached the coast of South Carolina. FBI investigators are reviewing the balloon debris recovered by US Navy sailors.
Defense officials also told a Senate panel on Thursday that shooting the balloon at first sight near Alaska also risked losing salvageable debris – and valuable intelligence – in frozen or deep-water areas where recovery operations would be impossible.
Following the hearing, Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana appeared to reject those arguments.
“They could’ve taken that balloon down, that spy balloon, and the greatest risk would’ve been hitting a cow, a prairie dog or an antelope,” he said. “I think this was, as much as anything, a test of this administration and their response to an invasion of our sovereign airspace, and the Biden administration failed by being indecisive.”
He said the Biden administration treated the balloon as if it was a “Chinese spy balloon concert tour”.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who chairs a subcommittee on Homeland Security, said what he learned from military officials in congressional briefings “confirms that the administration made the right decision” with its response.
“There was a non-zero chance this balloon, had it been downed over the United States, [would have] been very costly to American lives,” he told reporters on Thursday.
The balloon itself posed only a “low-level threat” but was a “compelling news story, an easy way for Republicans to beat up the president, but the president handled this very well,” he said.
“I think this story probably is a bit overhyped, with respect to the threat these balloons pose compared to the other activities China undertakes,” he added. “My hope is [that] in the aftermath of this story we can talk about the real threats.”
Chinese authorities have dismissed the Pentagon’s revelation that the balloon was part of China’s “larger” intelligence-gathering program, but the US Department of State believes the vessel was part of a Chinese military fleet that has performed similar operations in 40 countries across five continents.
In recent days, press reports and military officials have unveiled more details about the scale and scope of China’s surveillance operations, which include at least four other balloon sightings above the US in recent years, including three times during former President Donald Trump’s administration.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee on Thursday, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman said that China’s surveillance balloon reflects how the nation is America’s “only competitor with the intent and means to reshape the international order”.
“Last week the American people saw the latest example of that reality, after the US government detected, closely tracked, and shot down the [People’s Republic of China’]s high-altitude surveillance balloon that had entered our territorial airspace in clear violation of our sovereignty and international law,” she said.
The administration’s response “reaffirmed core priorities,” she said, echoing President Joe Biden’s remarks in his State of the Union, in which he warned that if “China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country.”
China’s “irresponsible act put on full display” how the nation has grown “more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad,” she added.
