The U.S. Overreacted to the Chinese Spy Balloon. That Scares Me.

With the aperture gradually widening on the recent incident involving the transit of U.S. airspace by a Chinese balloon, providing ever more information to the public about Beijing’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, this might seem like a peculiar time to amplify the response that some people had to the craft’s early sightings: Calm down.

The Chinese balloon incursion needs to be understood in two strongly contrasted ways though, and only one of them has received much focus: What does this tell us about Beijing today? That question is fairly easy to answer—so easy, in fact, that the best interpretation I’ve seen so far came from a comedian not particularly known for her deep insights into U.S.-China relations. “And by the way: China, if you’re listening—which, you obviously are—next time, why don’t you make your balloon the color blue so we can’t see it in the sky,” Chelsea Handler joked on The Daily Show.

This stark fact tells us a lot. Whether by outright calculation or inattention, the Chinese state—led by President Xi Jinping—felt no need to conceal an information-gathering operation as bold as this nor even to prepare a cover story that ordinary people would be comfortable delivering with a straight face. Instead, Beijing’s response was shoddily improvised, confused, and risibly untrue. First came a rare statement of diplomatic regret, then denial that the balloon was anything other than an ordinary weather monitoring device, and finally a tin-eared dudgeon: In effect, “How dare you shoot down our vessel?” and “We reserve the right to respond in defense of our legitimate rights.”

The good news that comes from this incident is that it has helped further lay bare that the relationship between the United States and China has become one of outright, near-adversarial competition over global power and influence. For most of the post-Mao Zedong era, which began in 1976, Beijing went to great lengths to conceal the nature of its ambitions—which have always involved returning China to a position it has enjoyed throughout almost all of its long history as one of the world’s foremost powers. Despite the ritual use of the phrase “win-win” by Chinese diplomats in that era, achieving this goal has always meant bringing the United States down a peg or two as much as it has meant doing whatever Beijing can do to elevate China—because power can only ever be understood in relative terms.

Throughout his time in power, Xi has increasingly broken with his predecessors’ diplomatic schtick of false modesty for his country while exhibiting an open willingness to compete with and challenge the United States in direct and even frontal ways.

Americans have not been used to being systemically challenged by anything like a peer competitor since the demise of the Soviet Union—and I, for one, find China’s willingness to exhibit its colors to be healthier and more manageable than the previous era of camouflaged ambitions was. It is the United States’ recent response, frankly, that worries me more.

To compete better with China, the United States is now rushing headlong toward the kind of industrial policy that focuses on the manufacturing of computer chips, with scant public debate or review of the efficacy of past efforts of this kind, including by China, which many experts would say has been a costly failure. I will return to the history of such efforts in a future column.

Meanwhile, reminiscent of the missile gap scare of the Cold War, recent days have even seen the emergence of reports that China’s nuclear missile program, still vastly smaller than that of the United States, has grown—and citing some Republican lawmakers in Congress who say that fact is worthy of alarm and demands a response. Moreover, turning the balloon incident into a hysterical partisan event, where the measurement of performance becomes posturing about toughness toward China, is far from the best way to protect U.S. interests or even to advertise the strength of the country’s political system.

Some things are new about this incursion, but most of its features are not—including the sending of balloons over an adversary’s territory, as the United States itself once did not only with the Soviet Union, as many experts have commented, but also, in fact, with China, as fewer people have observed. A level-headed assessment of what is new and potentially dangerous about China’s information-gathering effort as well as the rapid and sober declassification of information and the dissemination only of what is reliably known about Beijing’s targeting of the United States (and, apparently, many other countries) is probably the wisest course.

So unused to being challenged, though, the United States has entered into a mind frame toward China so filled with anxiety that sobriety is becoming nearly impossible, with the result that more and more often, Washington ends up scoring goals against itself. And the examples are piling up.

Take, for instance, Congress’s increasingly panicked response to the Chinese social media app TikTok. On Capitol Hill, U.S. politicians now vie for the strongest stance in denunciation of the supposed threat to national security that TikTok poses. Week after week, the number of voices calling for the outright banning of the app grows, including politicians from both parties. But have they really thought this through? Some serious academic studies, like this one from Georgia Institute of Technology, have judged the risks posed by the app to be relatively minor.

It is bigger questions than this, though, that concern me. In singling out TikTok for collecting user data and using it in unknown ways, U.S. officials are whistling past the much larger question of how internet-based businesses of all kinds treat personal communications and data.

Waving the flag against TikTok may provide the kind of sugar rush that comes with jingoism, but both good governance and better China policy would come from tackling this problem whole—which means saying, “Yes, an app owned by a Chinese tech firm may possibly be the leading edge of a problem, but the problem is an enormous one that goes well beyond TikTok. And creating a regulatory framework that offers basic protections to everyone impartially within the United States’ borders is the best way to advance the public interest.”

The people who want to ban TikTok also ignore a lever that the United States only has itself to blame for never having used with China: reciprocity. In the first years of this century, Beijing began walling off its citizens from U.S.-based internet companies, such as Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. The smartest thing for the United States to have done would have been to insist that Chinese internet companies cannot gain access to U.S. users unless the reverse is also true.

Trying quiet diplomacy around this first would have been most sensible, including working with other open societies to encourage them to also insist on reciprocal access rules. If that didn’t work though, hard judgements would have had to be made at some point, and firm restrictions would have been justified—with the added benefit that the Chinese public would eventually have come to understand that its government had refused equitable arrangements for all.

Level-headed and discreet but hard-nosed policymaking like this toward China seems almost like an impossible dream now. In its increasingly excited responses to Beijing’s perceived challenge, the United States betrays its own values at deep cost to itself—both domestically, in terms of the health of its polity but also in terms of the value proposition that it presents to the world.

The most recent example of this is the push from lawmakers in states including Texas, Florida, and Arkansas as well as in the U.S. Congress to ban Chinese citizens from buying property in the United States. With the advent of things like this, the United States finds itself at the crest of a very slippery slope. Instead of understanding China to be uniquely vulnerable right now because of its demographic crisis, too-slow-to-evolve economic model, political system that few countries wish to emulate, and lack of real allies, the people who are terrified by Beijing’s shadow risk undermining the thing they say they love the most: the United States itself.