It behooved the United States and China to hold the now-canceled talks, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, postponed because of the balloon incident, for all the reasons that others have said: to allay tensions, to reduce the risk of a military confrontation that neither government wants.
For those who couldn’t figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why. It became clear that, whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn’t want us to see. That something, it has slowly dribbled out since last May, was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace. Suspected Chinese drones have been a sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more. We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too.