The postponement, first reported by Bloomberg, was confirmed by the State Department Friday morning after the balloon was located over Montana late Thursday.
“We’ve assessed it would not be conducive or constructive to travel to Beijing right now,” a department official told reporters. “And I think, candidly speaking, in this current environment, I think it would have significantly narrowed the agenda that we would have been able to address.”
Blinken was due to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, on Sunday and Monday, in what was to be the first visit to Beijing by a US secretary of state since 2018.
[That’s the appropriate response to the violation of US airspace. We probably should have shot it down when it transversed the Aleutians on general principles of such violations, but it’s likely not much more of a security risk than China’s satellites over North America. Embarrassing Beijing is about as much use as we can get out of these incidents, plus we’re doing more substantive work in the Philippines to answer China’s aggression. More on that next. — Ed]
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