Bread and 60,000ft-high circuses

The Chinese balloon handily tested the Americans' mettle and showed it lacking once again.

About fifteen years ago my family had a couple of Chinese exchange students stay for a month. One of their favourite topics at tea time was the decline of the West and the inevitable rise of China. 'Your time has passed, ours has come,' was the gist of it.

With the West's decline into an onanistic fever of irrelevances accelerating daily the intervening few years will have done little to change the minds of our CCP-endorsed visitors.

The recent appearance of a Chinese 'weather balloon' – a meme doing the rounds had it daubed with 'Weather Barroon (Totary NOT For Spying)' – will have only added to such perceptions.

Despite not looking like an ordinary weather balloon, instead looking like a 'high-altitude surveillance device' according to some, the United States government, which fights tooth and nail over issues of gender identity, racial grievances and unfounded rumours of 'Russian disinformation', let the sky-high visitor from Beijing float unimpeded across the country.

What the device hoped to gain materially is uncertain. Considering the extent of China's influence across the economies and political structures of the West, the Chinese probably wouldn't have to bother with a giant, plain-to-see balloon in order to get any information they were after.

Perhaps it was, as they claim, just a balloon that they lost control of. Either way, it handily tested the Americans' mettle and showed it lacking once again, as the Yanks failed to blow it out the sky before it reached the continental United States.

A more confident America may have done so, a fact which China, rapaciously eyeing up the poor island of Taiwan, will surely keep in mind. Add to that the West's obsession with Ukraine, sapping its strength on an Eastern European border dispute of little actual interest to anyone but Kiev and Moscow (for more on this read Collingwood’s piece, The Thucydides Trap), and the lot of the happy emperor in Peking keeps only improving.