Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed a planned high-stakes weekend diplomatic trip to China as the Biden administration weighs a broader response to the discovery of a high-altitude Chinese balloon flying over sensitive sites in the western United States, U.S. officials said Friday.
The abrupt decision came despite China's claim that the balloon was a weather research "airship" that had blown off course. The U.S. has described it as a surveillance vehicle.
Discovery of the balloon was announced by Pentagon officials who said one of the places it was spotted was over the state of Montana, which is home to one of America's three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Blinken had been prepared as late as Thursday to travel to Beijing this weekend but the administration had begun to reconsider the trip following the discovery of the balloon on Wednesday, even before its presence was made public, an official said.
The official called the presence of the balloon "unacceptable" and said that message had been delivered by Blinken to Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi on Friday. Although the trip, which was agreed to in November by President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a summit in Indonesia, had not been formally announced, officials in both Beijing and Washington had been talking in recent days about Blinken's imminent arrival.The discovery alarmed many in Washington across the country and, besides the U.S.
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