Is the Biden administration intellectually honest enough with itself to treat this as a setback and learn from it?
As the Chinese spy balloon crisis deflates, a key question remains: Why did the PRC do it? The answer might be as simple as this: Because they could.
Maybe no one in Beijing believed that the Red Zeppelin would be allowed to overfly the entire United States. But then again, maybe they did. The Chinese intelligence community no doubt has a substantial personality profile on President Joe Biden, based on his self-admitted long association with President Xi Jinping. And Biden’s response to this crisis was true to form — risk averse, lacking in decisive leadership, yet claiming everything went according to plan. If any president was going to let this mess happen and still brag afterward, it would be Biden.