 U.S. surrounds China with war machinery while freaking out about balloons. In what Austin journalist Christopher Hooks has called one of the stupidest news cycles in recent memory, the entire American political media class is having an existential meltdown over what the Pentagon claims is a Chinese spy balloon detected in U.S. airspace on Thursday. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his scheduled diplomatic visit to China after the detection of the balloon. The mass media have been covering the story with breathless excitement. China Hawk pundits have been pounding the war drums all day on any platform they can get to and accusing the Biden administration of not responding aggressively enough to the incident. The important thing that the American people need to understand, and what we are going to try to expose in a bipartisan fashion on this committee, is that the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party is not just a distant threat in East Asia, or a threat to Taiwan. House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher told Fox News on Friday, it is a threat right here at home. It is a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest, in places like those that I live in. A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones, tweeted Senator Mitt Romney. Let's shut them all down. China's foreign ministry says the balloon is indeed from China, but is civilian in nature, used for meteorological and other scientific research, and was simply blown off course. This could of course be untrue. All major governments spy on each other constantly, and China is no exception. But the Pentagon's own assessment is that the balloon does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low Earth orbit. So everyone's losing their minds over a balloon, that in all probability would be mostly worthless for spying, even while everyone knows the US spies on China at every possible opportunity. US officials have complained to the press that American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them. And in 2001, a US spy plane caused a major international incident when it collided with a Chinese military jet on China's coastline killing the pilot. The US considers it its sovereign right to spy on any nation it chooses, and the average American tends to more or less see it the same way. This is highlighted in controversies around domestic versus foreign surveillance, for example. Americans were outraged over the Edward Snowden revelations, not because spy agencies were conducting surveillance, but because they were conducting surveillance on American citizens. It's just taken as a given that spying on foreigners is fine, so it's a bit silly to react melodramatically when foreigners return the favor. As Jake Warner explains for responsible statecraft, quote, foreign surveillance of sensitive US sites is not a new phenomenon. It's been a fact of life since the dawn of the nuclear age, and with the advent of satellite surveillance systems, it long ago became an everyday occurrence, as my colleague and former CIA analyst George Beebe puts it. US surveillance of foreign countries is likewise quite common. Indeed, great powers gathering intelligence on one another is one of the more banal and universal facts of international relations. Major countries even spy on their own allies, as when US intelligence bugged the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Typically, even when such surveillance is directed against the United States by a rival power, it does not threaten the safety of Americans and it poses manageable risks to sites where secrecy is of the utmost importance. However, in the context of rapidly increasing US-China tensions, foreseeable incidents like this can quickly balloon into dangerous confrontations, end quote. Now, let's contrast all this with another news story that's getting a lot less attention. In an article titled US Secures Deal on Philippines Bases to Complete Ark Around China, the BBC reports that the Empire will be adding even more installations to the already impressive military noose. It has been constructing around the PRC. The US has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines, a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, writes the BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes. With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea to Japan in the North and Australia to the South. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints, Taiwan and the South China Sea. The US hasn't said where the new bases are, but three of them could be on Luzon, an island in the northern edge of the Philippines, the only large piece of land close to Taiwan if you don't count China, writes Wingfield Hayes. The US Empire has been surrounding China with military bases and war machinery for many years in ways Washington would never tolerate China doing in the nations and waters surrounding the United States. There is no question that the US is the aggressor in this increasingly hostile standoff between major powers, yet we're all meant to be freaking out about a balloon. Ask me to show you how the US has been aggressing against China, and I can show you all the well-documented ways in which the US is encircling China with weapons of war. Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US, and they'll start babbling about TikTok and balloons. These things are not equal. Maybe Americans should stop watching out for hostile foreign threats and start looking a little closer to home.