US HAS ‘ABSOLUTE LEGAL RIGHT’ TO SHOOT DOWN CHINESE SPY BALLOON, SAY NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERTS.

Ilan Berman, senior vice president ot the American Foreign Policy Council, said it’s likely that the Biden administration is citing the possibility of debris to avoid causing an incident with China.

“They just don’t want to shoot it down, because they don’t want to provoke the Chinese,” he said.

Victoria Coates, a senior research fellow for international affairs and security at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, said that China has said that it is building these surveillance balloons and is most likely testing the U.S. to see what kind of reaction it gets with the intrusion.

“They rolled this over Alaska and Montana just to see what the response would be,” she said, adding that “we need to make very clear that this is our space.”

Coates said it is no coincidence that the balloon is hovering near U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fields and said that China can’t be believed when it says it’s collecting weather data.

“This really tests the bounds of credulity, given their past behavior,” she said.

Flashback: When Imperial Japan used bombs attached to balloons to attack America during WWII: In 1945, a Japanese Balloon Bomb Killed Six Americans, Five of Them Children, in Oregon.