In an odd deja vu of the paper’s scoop from June 8, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island. Two weeks ago, the Journal reported China and Cuba reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island.
The Biden administration initially insisted the Journal’s June 8 report was not accurate, and it was later revealed that China already has electronic eavesdropping facilities on the island, and that the two countries are finalizing plans for a new, bigger and more advanced facility.
As I noted in that other Washington publication I write for last week, the Biden administration has a well-rehearsed playbook for unexpected bad news regarding the U.S. relationship with China – a relationship that is about to enjoy a “thaw,” in the words of President Biden. (The Editors of NR notice that the Biden team gave up quite a bit just to get Secretary of State Antony Blinken a meeting with Xi Jinping.) The playbook is to insist the news isn’t that bad, and that the Biden administration inherited the problem from the Trump administration anyway.
With the Chinese spy balloon, national security adviser Jake Sullivan boasted, “we were also able to ensure the protection of any sensitive information that the balloon would not be able to collect against us.” The same day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “we protected against Chinese intelligence collection because we knew exactly where the balloon was going.”
Weeks later, government sources told NBC News, “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts.”
Biden dismissed the spy balloon as “silly,” but it was much more advanced than the U.S. government expected:
The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Now Biden insists the whole spy balloon incident was an embarrassment for the Chinese government:
Well, look, China has some legitimate difficulties unrelating to the — unrelated to the United States. And I think one of the things that that balloon caused was not so much that it got shot down, but I don’t think the leadership knew where it was and knew what was in it and knew what was going on. It was — I think it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.
Once again, in Biden’s mind, his policies are working wonders, all noticeable problems aren’t really problems at all, and all criticism of his past decisions are malarkey.