“America is under assault from Chinese spying and if the Biden Administration refuses [to] respond it will send a message to the Chinese military that they can send even more spy balloons. Inaction invites dangerous behavior,” Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. …

“We should take everything China does seriously because China does everything with intentionality and the intentions are never good for us. Priority one is what is China up to and why?” James Carafano, vice president of The Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, told The Daily Signal in an email. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“China’s response is completely mendacious and really demonstrates how little we can trust the Chinese. From the limited information we have it is clear this is an illegal military surveillance mission-and now the Pentagon admits not the first,” Carafano said. “To be frank, Biden’s equivocation and fecklessness on foreign policy invites adventurism. We have seen it from the Russians and now we are seeing it from China.”

[Again, we should be careful not to contribute to a social panic. China likely gets better intel from its satellites, hacking, and listen-in surveillance activities than it would from a balloon. However, it does underscore just how much of a threat China remains, and it will hopefully stimulate a much deeper threat assessment on all of those issues than we have seen from the Biden administration thus far. — Ed]