WTH Happened with the Chinese Spy Balloon? Rep. Mike Gallagher on the Brazen CCP Incursion and the Threat from Communist China

The Biden Administration has been “too little too late” in
countering Russia, and is increasingly playing by the same rules
with the Chinese Communist Party. The latest national security
spectacle played out over a full week before the White House
ordered the shoot down of the Chinese spy balloon that floated
from the tip of Alaska all the way through the coast of the
Carolinas. The questions surrounding this event are numerous:
what was NORAD doing while it watched this slow-moving CCP target
drift into American airspace? If this has happened in the past,
as the White House maintains, why don’t we have a standard
operating procedure to deal with it? But beyond this incident, it
is the implications of the U.S. reaction that truly matter – if
it takes a civilian standing in a field in Montana to point out a
security threat to prompt the White House to action, we have a
problem. If we don’t get serious, fast, about China, we’re adding
to the problems we already face with the CCP. And if we continue
to hedge on defense spending, and see Chinese incursions and
major wars as isolated crises, the nation will pay a much heavier
price down the road.


Representative Mike Gallagher (WI-08) is the new Chairman of the
Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United
States and the Chinese Communist Party. He is also on the House
Armed Services Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, and the Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee. He has served in the House since 2017. Before that, he
served for seven years on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps,
including two deployments in Iraq. He also served as the lead
Republican staffer for the Middle East and Counterterrorism on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


Download the transcript here.