The utterly humiliating saga of a high-altitude Chinese surveillance “balloon” successfully traversing the entire North American continent, only to be shot down off the South Carolina coast after completing its intelligence-gathering voyage, ought to serve as a wake-up call for America’s decadent ruling class. At Newsweek, Paul du Quenoy sagely compared the affair to the young West German pilot Mathias Rust’s successful 1987 landing of his small Cessna just outside Moscow’s Red Square, a similarly “irreparable blight” wherein a “sclerotic empire’s air defense systems stood powerless at the sight of an airborne foreign intruder.” That comparison is damning, but proper. True, a different and less senile commander in chief might have—and should have—responded in swifter and more decisive fashion, but the sheer fact of the matter is that America’s geopolitical arch-foe felt emboldened to act as it did. The relevant question now presented to America’s ruling class is whether it has the humility to soberly acknowledge the fallen state of U.S.- China relations and to chart a path forward that best secures the national interest of our ailing and war-weary republic.
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