On the 1st May 1960, a Lockheed U-2 high altitude jet aircraft was shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg). The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower announced that a ‘civilian weather research aircraft’ had gone down somewhere ‘north of Turkey’. Of course, the U-2 was no civilian jet. It was a spy plane carrying out aerial reconnaissance of Soviet military bases. What is more, its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had parachuted to safety and been arrested.
This latter fact was hidden from the Americans by the Soviets, who allowed their Cold War adversary to tie itself in knots with an increasingly elaborate cover-up story. Only when it had gone so far, did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announce:
I must tell you a secret. When I made my first report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well … and now just look how many silly things the Americans have said.
It was a humiliating blow for Eisenhower, who had taken steps towards a rapprochement with Khrushchev and the Soviets at Camp David the year before. Now, a sophisticated spy plane, with much of its technology intact and a captured pilot, were in enemy hands. Beyond embarrassment, the incident also wrecked the prospects of a Four Powers Summit held a few days later in Paris between the US, Soviets, Britain and France. Khrushchev stormed out early and the potential Cold War thaw was dashed.
The 1960 U-2 incident has some interesting parallels with the recent shooting down of a high-altitude Chinese balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Having been identified over Montana on the 3rd February the balloon, which the Chinese have claimed was a civilian weather monitoring device blown off course, was tracked across the American mainland before being downed by an air-to-air missile fired by an F-22 fighter jet.
Despite the Chinese government’s claims, the flight of the balloon past several American military bases makes a spying mission the likely reason for its appearance. And although sophisticated satellite technology exists, a contraption used for photographic reconnaissance since the 19th century has drawn light on China’s brazen attempts to siphon secrets from its rival. Whether it was a deliberate provocation to test American resolve, as some have suggested, attempts to salvage the wreckage of the balloon demonstrate Washington’s hopes of gaining their own intelligence on Beijing’s military surveillance equipment.
After all, whilst photographs from a balloon may sound an archaic and amateurish way of collecting sensitive data, who knows what sensors and software were on board? Flying at heights of up to 120,000 feet, these are not the hot air balloons of the 1800s, when some of the first aerial photographs were taken. Nor are they the great dirigibles of the early 20th century, the Zeppelins that transported people across the Atlantic, bombed British cities during World War One and compiled detailed target photography in the build-up to World War Two.
Some argue that the Chinese balloon incident is a defining moment in a ‘new Cold War’, when the threat of the Communist Party (CCP) under dictator Xi Jinping first became tangible for ordinary Americans. Yet whilst Chinese assertiveness abroad has continued to grow under Xi’s watch, to label the US-Chinese rivalry as another Cold War is misleading. Whilst there are wild political and ideological differences between Beijing and Washington, we are not entering a new bipolar moment; the world is too interconnected, America and China’s economies too intertwined for that.
Yet that does not mean we should not be wary. As a second Chinese balloon makes itself visible over Latin America, critics of Joe Biden have lambasted his apparent indecision, his willingness to allow a hostile enemy aircraft travel freely over American territory. Sowing division in the West is what China and Russia, and countries of similar ilk, do best. For minimal cost and effort, Xi may be quietly satisfied with the havoc his balloon has caused.
The situation does not reflect the tension of 1960, when West and East were pitted against one another in Europe, when the spectre of nuclear war was a daily reality, when the shooting down of a spy plane threatened more than a diplomatic spat.
Some perspective is required, and the Biden administration’s decision to cancel Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to China, whilst understandable, is regrettable. Even under the greatest strain, Washington and Moscow found ways to maintain communicate during the Cold War. Washington and Beijing must do the same to prevent their deteriorating relationship from boiling over into a geopolitical contest that sparks a real crisis.
History's Shadow 