THE BALLOON REALLY WAS A ‘SPUTNIK MOMENT:’
We don’t know enough about any of the post-February 4 objects to render a judgment about the threat they pose or who, precisely, is doing the threatening. But the West’s reaction to that balloon is instructive. America’s defense posture shifted almost overnight toward enhanced scrutiny of its airspace. Pivoting from the paralytic reaction to the balloon that started it all, the U.S. apparently has no compunction about neutralizing unknown objects before they’ve had the chance to execute their missions, whatever they may be. These events take place against the backdrop of a genuine, sober, and bipartisan assumption among U.S. lawmakers that China’s rise presents a potentially existential threat to the American-led geopolitical order.
The Cold War began long before the Soviets achieved escape velocity. The threat posed by the Communist Bloc was apparent to all who were willing to see it at least a decade earlier. It did, however, focus American minds. The competition with the USSR wouldn’t be limited to distant theaters where only clandestine operatives and proxy armies would fight. The threat was to the American homeland. Likewise, the threat to America’s core strategic interests posed by resurgent great powers should have been undeniable by 2014, after Russia invaded and annexed sovereign European territory for the first time since 1945. But the naïve could place their hopes in the notion that far-off conflicts would remain far-off. As the wreckage of foreign surveillance devices rains down over the American continent, the hopeful should by now be disabused of their optimism.
One big difference between today’s “Sputnik Moment” and the original is the man in charge at the time. As the late Paul Johnson wrote of Ike in Modern Times:
His first biographer claimed that the ‘unanimous consensus’ of ‘journalists and academics, pundits and prophets, the national community of intellectuals and critics’ had been that Eisenhower’s conduct of the presidency had been ‘unskilful and his definition of it inaccurate …. [he] elected to leave his nation to fly on automatic pilot.’ He was seen as well-meaning, intellectually limited, ignorant, inarticulate, often weak and always lazy.
The reality was quite different. ‘Complex and devious’, was the summing-up of his Vice-President, Richard Nixon (no mean judge of such things); ‘he always applied two, three or four lines of reasoning to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect approach’. In the late 1970s, the opening up of the secret files kept by his personal secretary, Ann Whitman, phone logs, diaries and other personal documents, revealed that Eisenhower worked very much harder than anyone, including close colleagues, supposed.
Flash-forward to today: Sen. Ron Johnson: Biden Is ‘Detached from Reality — He’s Delusional.’
And our enemies know it.