The Balloon Panic and the Wages of Threat Inflation

The U.S. doesn’t know how to respond to real or imagined threats with sobriety because our political culture is so saturated in constant fearmongering about foreign dangers.

Howard French is worried about what the balloon panic says about how the U.S. is managing its relations with China:

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.

The hawkish consensus on China is founded on threat inflation and inevitably produces dangerous overreactions like the one we have been seeing in response to the surveillance balloon. It is not possible to have a policy debate where alarmists set the terms and boundaries of that debate and then end up with a sober and level-headed approach. When you have had at least half of the political class hyperventilating about non-existent Chinese bases, China’s non-existent pursuit of nuclear parity, imaginary Chinese attacks within the next few years, and Beijing’s supposed designs for world domination for years, there are bound to be overreactions to every perceived provocation. The belief that the U.S. may be “losing” its “lead” or even “falling behind” in the “competition” predictably causes irrational responses.

Hawks have been trying to scare the hell out the public about China for some time, and they are going to seize on every incident, no matter how minor or unthreatening, to do that. When policymakers and pundits have been fueling a rivalry by appealing to and stoking fear, they can hardly be surprised when many people are then excessively afraid of the threat that they have been exaggerating every day. Threat inflation can sometimes work so well that the fear it creates takes on a life of its own.

One of the more bizarre responses that I have seen in the wake of the balloon panic was from Richard Fontaine, who saw the balloon incident as something that would awaken the American public from their supposed torpor: “And so while no one could have predicted it, China’s balloon may well spur America’s awakening.” Fontaine clearly hopes that the public will support a more aggressive China policy, but only as long as it doesn’t get out of hand: “On the other hand, a fine line exists between motivation to compete and overreaction to perceived threats.” He thinks the public has not been sufficiently alarmed about China before now, but he also seems to think that you can have an intense international rivalry with another major power without the overreactions that have always accompanied such rivalries. Fontaine warns against “panic and bravado,” but the framing of his own article in terms of waking up from a slumber encourages both.

The U.S. doesn’t know how to respond to real or imagined threats with sobriety because our political culture is so saturated in constant fearmongering about foreign dangers. When hardline posturing is treated as proof of taking something “seriously,” it doesn’t take much to get an increasingly stupid bidding war going among our politicians as they try to outdo one another in their aggressiveness. If someone responds to a relatively minor incident with anything less than incandescent outrage, it is cast as evidence of “weakness” and lack of “resolve.”

Under these conditions, policymakers aren’t going to be interested in responding soberly and carefully. They will feel compelled to show how “tough” and hostile they can be. The same pattern repeats itself with every new big militarized cause that the U.S. embraces, whether at the start of the Cold War or at the outset of the “war on terror.” The reasonable and sane people in the debate quickly find themselves either marginalized or forced to ape the behavior of the extremists. It is happening again now, and we can expect it to get worse as the hawkish consensus on China congeals and hardens into an unquestionable orthodoxy.