Exploring the enemy's mind

Between laughs, but with all the formality, the spokesmen of the White House have clarified the mystery.

It is not an alien like ET who watches us from floating artifacts in the stratosphere.

One of them, a huge balloon, moved forward and backward by remote control, capturing images and recording broadcasts, and even floundered and lurched when hovering over the silos where the United States keeps its intercontinental missiles, the terrifying tools of nuclear deterrence.

Had it not been for the tragic news from Ukraine and the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Joe Biden's shoot-down of such gossipy flying devices would have been greeted with greater alarm.

Some bellicose Republican congressmen, demanding a faster and more forceful response, tried to stir it up, before they learned that the intruders had already walked over the presidential head of Donald Trump without anyone knowing.

China, recognized owner of the largest of the four artifacts shot down in a few days, has also reacted, outraged and convinced of its right to pry without reprimand in other people's skies.

The first downed device, contrary to the Beijing version, was not a mere weather balloon collecting vulgar meteorological data.

It can easily be assigned another, more serious mission, such as testing the detection, alarm, defense systems and, above all, the political reaction of the enemy.

In a matter of days, a new space of confrontation has emerged under the orbits of satellites of all kinds, including spies, and on air transport routes, including missiles that are exchanged between Russians and Ukrainians.

Error, accident or even poor coordination between military espionage and the Chinese government cannot be ruled out, but this bloodless stratospheric war has come to evoke at a sensitive moment the episodes of tension between Washington and Moscow from the 1950s to the end of the Cold War.

Like Russia, China is not content with the current international order.

He wants to refound it and put his mark on some new global relationships.

It penetrates into gray or empty areas where there are not yet international laws or agreed norms and tries to create facts on the ground.

Or in the skies.

The bipolar relationship is strained just as Vladimir Putin proves incapable of quickly resolving his war challenge in Ukraine.

And finally, he always declares his presence and his weight, also his distrust and his aggressiveness.

It happens in the stratosphere, on the disputed peaks of the Himalayas or in the surrounding seas that it wants to take over.

The response to the downed balloon over North Carolina could well be to shoot down a similar device from their enemy over international waters around Taiwan.

With a miniscule, harmless crisis, China watches how the United States will behave if things turn uglier and reach the scale of the Ukraine war.

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