Washington (EFE).- The spokesman for the White House Security Council, John Kirby, defends the actions of the United States in shooting down the Chinese spy balloon that was flying over the national territory for several days and assured that international law was respected.
“The United States acted in accordance with international law and in defense of our homeland and our sovereign airspace,” he said in a conversation with the press, two days after the North American country shot down the balloon with a missile, in front of the South Carolina waters.
The shootdown, Kirby said, was done “about six miles offshore within our territorial airspace so we could comply with international law,” “unlike the Chinese, who failed to comply with international law by flying over the sovereign airspace of the United States.
“We are absolutely within our right to throw the balloon at them and we are going to recover as much as we can to learn from their mission,” he stressed.
Kirby thus responded to China after Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng accused the country of overreacting and “seriously violating the spirit of international law” with “indiscriminate use of force.”
The Chinese official added that China will protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and “defend the interests and dignity of the country”, a phrase that has set off all the alarms of a possible conflict between the two powers.
However, Kirby tried to downplay the incident by assuring that “there is no reason” for the tensions in the bilateral relationship “to lead to some kind of conflict.”
Blinken’s visit to China was postponed because of the Chinese balloon
The spokesman specified that the visit of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to the Asian country that was to start this weekend “has not been cancelled, but has been postponed.”
Despite China continuing to maintain that the balloon was part of a civilian mission seeking to obtain weather data, the United States continues to maintain that it has sufficient evidence that the balloon was seeking to spy on sensitive national security sites.
“They want to make believe that it was some kind of innocent weather balloon that was just floating in the air. We know they had control over his speed and direction and we believe he was conducting surveillance on hypersensitive military sites inside the United States,” he said.
Despite the incident, Kirby assured that the vision of the president, Joe Biden, that the relationship with China is “very important” has not changed, and insisted that the United States does not seek a conflict with China.
“There is no question that US-China relations, even before this incident, were tense. That is one of the reasons why it was so important for the president to meet with President Xi Jinping at the G20″, he recounted.
The meeting that took place in Bali in November served to “begin to work on how to restart some of the communication vehicles that the Chinese closed as a result of the visit of the president (of the House of Representatives, Nancy) Pelosi to the island of Taiwan”.
Three Chinese balloons in the Trump era
Kirby assures that, during the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021) at least three Chinese balloons flew over the United States.
“On at least three occasions, surveillance balloons from the People’s Republic of China transited our airspace. I will say that, according to all the indications we have, that was for short periods, nothing like what we saw last week in terms of duration, “he said in a meeting with the media.
The existence of these balloons was discovered during the Joe Biden government in circumstances that Kirby did not want to reveal and it is not clear that Trump knew about it at the time.
«I cannot speak of the awareness that there was in the previous Administration about these facts. I can tell you that we discovered these flights after we got to the office and I am not going to go into details of how we did it,” he said.
Through social networks, Trump said on Sunday that under his government no Chinese “spy balloon” flew over the United States.
“Now they are publishing that China placed a balloon during the Trump Administration, to take the ‘heat’ (pressure) off Biden’s slow fools,” said the former president, but China “has too much respect” for him for that to happen. happen, he added.
According to Kirby, after the find they communicated “with key officials of the Trump Administration”, offered them briefings on the forensic analyzes they did and expressed their willingness to “walk them through” what they learned.
Kirby did not detail whether these officials accepted the invitation, although he confirmed that “those briefings have not yet taken place.”
“This whole program from China is not new. It’s something they’ve been working on for many years and trying to improve on,” she said.
Trump and other figures from the Republican Party have criticized in recent days the slowness of the Biden government to eliminate the balloon. Shortly after it became known of its existence last Thursday, Trump demanded that it be shot down, despite the fact that the Pentagon recommended not doing so until the device reached the sea.
