On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) stated that while China has flown spy balloons over the U.S. before, this most recent move is an “escalatory” move and “was different than previous balloons” and “very different” from Chinese satellites.
Khanna said that China can get a lot of the information they presumably wanted from the balloon better from satellites, and “it looks like it happened a number of times before. But the China Committee is going to get a full briefing from the relevant administration officials so we can get the facts. The point is, though, that this is unnecessarily escalatory for China and they have a lot to lose. I mean, we’ve got a 400 billion trade deficit with China, that means we have far more leverage. They need us to buy things from them. Their economy is far more dependent on us. For them to take these kind of escalatory measures is not in their self-interest. And we need to be very, very clear that this is unacceptable.”
He added that he thinks President Joe Biden’s handling of the situation was right, and “I think the signal to China is, we will shoot it down at our own choosing, whenever we want, but don’t underestimate us and we’re going to listen to the military and they would draw the exact wrong lesson if they thought this was some kind of weakness. I do think this was different than previous balloons. We can’t have a balloon traverse the entire continental United States without having consequences.”
Khanna further stated that China’s satellites are “very different than having a balloon traverse the United States’ airspace and go across the entire continental United States.”
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