THE WSJ, UNPAYWALLED: Biden and the Chinese Spy Balloon: Why did he wait so long to order the airspace intruder shot down?

Start with the chronology of when the balloon crossed into U.S. airspace and the long delay in shooting it down. Mr. Biden said Saturday that on Wednesday he had ordered the Pentagon to take down the balloon. But that was already half a week after the balloon had entered the U.S. over Alaska, crossed into Canada and then into Montana.

Mr. Biden said his military advisers wanted to wait to shoot down the spy balloon until it reached U.S. territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean. The justification for delay was the risk of falling debris, but that is hard to credit.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports an unintentionally amusing Pentagon claim that shooting down the balloon at 60,000 feet would have endangered 2,000 people in Montana. Not 2,500? How could anyone know such a specific number? In any case, the balloon entered Alaskan airspace days earlier. Was there no safe place to down the balloon in that vast and sparsely populated state? Let’s hope Navy divers can recover the balloon’s intelligence-gathering equipment intact. . . .

Other questions for the White House include whether and when it raised the balloon issue with Beijing, and how the Chinese responded. Did they lie to U.S. officials the way their foreign ministry lied to the world on Friday in calling the balloon merely a “civilian airship” doing mainly “meteorological” data collection? Media reports say the White House kept its knowledge of the balloon under wraps until it was spotted by civilians on the ground, which made disclosure unavoidable.

It’s fair to wonder if the Administration hoped the balloon would cross the U.S. into the Atlantic without public notice. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit Beijing this week in a high-stakes attempt to put U.S.-China relations on a less contentious footing. So much for that. On Friday Mr. Blinken postponed the trip, and the balloon fallout will make its resumption harder.

The Chinese response to the shootdown was relatively mild by its standards, albeit reserving “the right to make further responses if necessary.” But sending a balloon to spy on the U.S. on the eve of the talks was a reckless, if all too typical, Communist Party provocation.

It’s bad enough if the People’s Liberation Army launched it to scuttle the Blinken visit. It’s worse if the spy flight was sanctioned by the Politburo and President Xi Jinping. In that case the conclusion has to be that they wanted to test Mr. Biden. Is the U.S. President so eager to court better relations that he’d overlook the spy balloon if it wasn’t detected? This is familiar Chinese diplomatic behavior to probe for weakness in an adversary.

They found that weakness. They now will expect us to dither for days in the face of provocation. That will embolden them, even if they turn out to be wrong.

In addition, though the Biden people say this happened under Trump. The Trump people — even those who have written hostile tell-all memoirs since — say it didn’t. Maybe it did, but the Pentagon bureaucracy never told the political appointees of the Trump Administration. Given the way the bureaucracy behaved under Trump, that’s not at all implausible.

For the Chinese, this is proof that we are operating under an inept administration. It’s that for the rest of us, too.