The Balloon

Key events in history sometimes aren’t obvious in the moment. They tend to be strange things, ripe with details that can maneuver them into myth as the grand narratives are developed over time. And so the catastrophic Thirty Years War is presaged by the Defenestration of Prague, in which a pair of Catholic royal governors were chucked out of a window. So the fuse on the First World War is lit when Gavrilo Princip fucks up his attempt to assassinate the Austrian Archdule Ferdinand and goes off to sulk at a nearby cafe, only for Ferdinand’s carriage to stop outside by happenstance and give him another shot. The resulting geopolitical cascade chewed up fifteen million lives — four times that if you consider the Second World War a direct extension of the First.

I have this feeling deep in my gut that the events of the past week or so will prove very important. Not necessarily in the “It kicks off this specific Great Event” kind of way, but rather in the way it illustrates a moment. A painter of context for a critical and precarious time.

The Chinese sent a spy balloon over the United States about ten days ago. A big one, hundreds of yards across, holding up some kind of control station that was the length of three city buses. It showed up over the Aleutian Islands and the made its way over Montana, where citizens on the ground began to take photos and video of it. The government didn’t say anything about it at first, but soon it floated over other states and the information pinged around down the channels that it was Chinese, which those in charge didn’t deny. The Chinese didn’t deny it was theirs either, though they claimed it was a weather balloon. After much hand-wringing in the official messaging, the craft was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Meetings between Chinese and American diplomats were cancelled. Chinese state media rattled their sabers under the table. Similar balloons were spotted elsewhere around the globe, suggesting a wider “spying in broad daylight” campaign.

The reason behind the blatant incursion into American airspace on the part of the Chinese is surely less about spying and more about “shit-testing.” It’s the kind of thing you do knowing full that your adversary will know about it, but you don’t care because the real intelligence you’re gathering is what they do about it. Do they act assertively and shoot the thing down the moment if shows up over their airspace? Or do they doddle and snipe at internal enemies through a couple media cycles to see if people keep paying attention, taking action only when it no longer matters? Of course the United States chose the latter, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who also watched the decadent farce that was the President’s State of the Union Address to Congress the day after the Air Force took down the balloon. Whatever real purpose these addresses once served, they’ve long since devolved into a garish piece of television theater that dramatizes what it must have looked like in the Roman Senate once it had been stripped of its real power and strong characters and stocked with ridiculous play actors sucking at the tit of the Imperial center.

The United States is in its decline phase. The hallmarks are all there, and the fall is likely to be more rapid than those of, say, the Roman and British empires. This is not lost on direct competitors and any other players who might wish to fill the scattered regions of the vacuum the American Empire’s demise will leave behind. The decline of hegemonic empires are usually very dangerous periods. The game theory holding up the long-lasting order tends to shift quickly and radically at unpredictable moments. The signs of rot in the imperial core grow more and more obvious, and ambitious aspirants to thrones big and small start to roll the dice. Maybe in little ways at first - like floating unarmed balloons over the empire’s heartland. But then in larger, dangerous ways that can kick off events those gamblers don’t expect and often don’t want. And so the world wars are not possible without the clear decline of British naval might. Putin likely doesn’t invade the Ukraine when he did without the Americans’ embarrassing exit from Afghanistan six months earlier.

There are signs and symbols of vigorous nations and vigorous peoples. The Japanese sent balloons over America during the Second World War. They were laden with explosives — not enough to do serious damage to the homeland but enough to cause panic and, the Japanese hoped, possibly ignite forest fires. One of these balloons floated over rural Utah, where a local sheriff named Warren Hyde rode his horse out to meet it. He seized it with his lasso and held on for over an hour as it dragged him through fields and forest and even barbed wire. At one point it hoisted him up thirty feet in the air. But he eventually tied it down. Yes, the balloon was almost on the ground already when Sheriff Hyde went after it. But the point is that it was completely normal and even expected at that time for someone like him to be around and to take on a dangerous floating bomb without hesitation.

Now we have a perma-distracted populace seal-clapping to late show hosts who make jokes about aggressive foreign incursions into American territory. A bloated and corrupt defense industrial caste who mumble about the findings delivered to them by their innumerate committees about how it’s just not possible to bring the thing down with any haste. And so they cheer themselves where they finally down the invader — the first aerial “kill” for their $1.5 trillion F-22 fighter plane that’s been active for twenty years — after it has traversed the entirety of the North American continent. Also congratulating himself is the doddering elderly man serving as a placeholder president, who shouts and waves his fists in the great seat of American legislative power at a gaggle of jabbering simpletons from the “opposition party” who take every chance to beclown themselves as they dupe and misdirect their donor base.

All the while the wolves do circle. Take a quick run or snap at the great beast to see what it does, in its old and decrepit state. Closer each time. More willing to gamble.

The decade ahead promises to be substantial.