As Jazz pointed out this morning, China has put out an official explanation for why their spy balloon is drifting over the state of Montana. According to the always reliable CCP, the balloon is theirs but they weren’t trying to spy on anyone. “It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course,” they claimed. Just a weather balloon that happened to be pushed off course and directly over US nuclear missile silos. Nothing to see here.

That story apparently didn’t suffice for Secretary of State Tony Blinken who was scheduled to fly to Beijing this weekend.

The decision came just hours before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to depart for Beijing — in a dramatic indication of how seriously the Biden administration takes the incident and wants to avoid appearing soft on China…

Since the outset of his presidency, Biden has been sensitive to Republican criticisms that he is insufficiently tough on China, although on the issue of canceling the trip, Republicans were divided on the matter. Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) called on the administration to cancel the trip while House Speaker Kevin McCarthy demanded a “Gang of Eight” intelligence briefing from the president on the balloon…

Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee encouraged Blinken to use the trip to send a tough message to China regarding the suspected spy balloon. But U.S. officials appeared to be concerned about the optics of the visit in the wake of the incursion, even though experts said the incident, even if it were an act of espionage, was not remarkable.

The cancelation of this meeting is a bigger deal that in might seem, in part because Blinken was going to meet with Xi Jinping himself. This story was published today before the trip was canceled.

When Antony Blinken travels to Beijing on Sunday, he’ll be the first U.S. Secretary of State to do so since 2018 and the first cabinet member to visit China in the Biden administration. Still, given an increasingly fractious bilateral relationship, expectations for the two-day trip were low—that was until reports emerged Friday that Chinese President Xi Jinping would break with recent protocol and meet personally with Blinken.

First reported by the Financial Times and since confirmed by diplomatic sources to TIME, Blinken is expected to sit down with Xi to build on the nascent rapprochement forged with President Joe Biden in Bali last November, when the leaders agreed to explore avenues to stabilize relations between the world’s top two economies.

Xi’s decision to meet Blinken in Beijing has surprised U.S. diplomats given recent frosty engagement between the two countries has been governed by strict adherence to parity of officials’ numbers and rank, with COVID-19 travel restrictions rendering preparations for meetings especially testy.

I don’t have any inside information but just based on the timeline it sounds like China was trying to hold onto this meeting. The spy balloon crossed into America sometime earlier this week and was seen over Montana on Wednesday. Thursday, afternoon, this became a big story in the US and was covered by every major outlet. Then, unexpectedly, China announced that Xi Jinping would meet with Blinken, which normally wouldn’t happen because Blinken is a rank below Biden. It sounds like China was offering a last-minute inducement for Blinken to make the trip even as they realized the spy balloon story had, if you’ll forgive the pun, blown up. And now Blinken hasn’t just hung up on whatever functionary he would normally have met with, he’s hung up on Xi Jinping.

As for the balloon, it’s true that China doesn’t have the ability to control it at this point but it’s also true that they carefully planned its path before it was released. In other words, it wasn’t pulled off course by surprise. China intended for it to be there. Meteorologist Dan Satterfield created this model show how it could be done:

#DOD says high altitude balloon over Montana yesterday was a spy balloon from #China. I did a quick run of the #NOAA HYSPLIT model to trace backwards the path of an object. Using 14K meters over Montana yesterday I get the following – Yup Central China!https://t.co/FHiG79f4th pic.twitter.com/DeZLjjkPei

— Dan Satterfield (@wildweatherdan) February 2, 2023

And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this.

In the past, the US has simply allowed balloons like this to waft away, without taking any action or publicizing their presence over the US, the sources said. It is also not the first time a surveillance balloon has appeared over the United States.

The US official said there were similar incidents with suspected Chinese surveillance balloons over Hawaii and Guam in recent years. On Thursday, a senior defense official said, “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration.”

All of this fits with China’s “boil the frog” approach to military endeavors which I described yesterday. First they release a balloon over Hawaii or Guam and when we don’t react to that they release one over the US or, as Jazz pointed out this morning, maybe two. Each incremental step is just a little more invasive than the last one and they always have some story ready for plausible deniability, i.e. the winds pulled our meteorological research balloon off course.

Again, this balloon probably doesn’t have any greater capabilities to spy on the US than the satellites China already has in space. But that’s not the point. The point is to constantly test the limits of what we’re willing to tolerate and then push a little farther the next time. But in this case the CCP really miscalculated. Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called it a “brazen act by the Chinese” and expressed surprise that they weren’t denying it outright. An unnamed US military official said the issue was the “audacity” of this move.

A US military official said that the incident was “definitely serious” because of the “audacity” of the Chinese government, rather than any intelligence gain. While existing satellites are able to gather similar amounts of information, the timing of the spy balloon — right before the planned Blinken trip — and the fact that this is right over the continental US contribute to the seriousness of this moment, the official said.

The Pentagon has held a briefing and is rejecting the Chinese cover story that this was a weather balloon pulled off course. Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said “the fact is, we know that it’s a surveillance balloon.” He added, “Right now, we assess that it will probably be over the United States for a few days.” The Pentagon continues to track it but isn’t saying where it is exactly.

Finally, there’s a story over at The War Zone about how this balloon is part of a larger pattern. The included several tweets highlighting similar incidents in the US, India and Japan.

Feb 2022, Air Force scrambles F-22's in Hawaii bc of a high-altitude "unmanned balloon without observable identification markings."

Seems remarkably similar to the balloon over Montana right nowhttps://t.co/qs4TObmVjk pic.twitter.com/2on54uVCAe

— Alexis De Popeville (@JohnPaulThee3rd) February 3, 2023

The origin of the balloon over Hawaii was never reported, though it may have just been confirmed today. Also, doesn’t this looks awfully familiar? These were taken over India and Japan.

Same balloon was spotted over Japan on June 17th, 2020 in Hachinohe City, and September 3, 2021 in Miyagi Prefecture pic.twitter.com/NDyjstXp7B

— Balloon Science by Dan (@BalloonSciDan) January 6, 2022

So, China has been doing this for a while but with tensions already high, their latest incursion was a step too far.