The spokesman for the National Security Council of the United States, John Kirby, defended this Monday (06) the decision of the American government to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon that spent several days flying over the country and stressed that it was taken based on in international law.
At a press conference, Kirby reiterated that the US has sufficient evidence that the balloon was used to spy on strategic locations, but said that, despite the incident, “there is no reason” for tensions in the relationship with China “to lead to any kind of of conflict”.
“The United States acted in accordance with international law and in defense of our homeland and our sovereign airspace,” he told a news conference two days after the balloon was shot down by a missile off the coast of South Carolina. .
Kirby said the shot was fired “about six miles off the coast within our territorial airspace so that we could comply with international law, unlike the Chinese, who failed to comply with international law by flying over US sovereign airspace.” .
“We are absolutely within our rights to take the balloon away from them and we will recover as much as we can to learn about their mission,” he emphasized.
Kirby made the statement after Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng accused the US of overreacting and “seriously violating the spirit of international law” with an “indiscriminate use of force”.
Xie added that China will protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and “uphold the interests and dignity of the country”, a statement that sent warning signals about a possible conflict between the two powers.
However, Kirby tried to play down the incident, assuring that “there is no reason” for the tensions in the bilateral relationship “to lead to some kind of conflict”.
For this reason, according to him, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China, which should have taken place last weekend, “was not cancelled, but postponed”.
While China continues to claim that the balloon was part of a civilian mission to obtain weather data, the US argues that it has sufficient evidence that the balloon was intended to spy on sensitive national security sites.
“They want us to believe this was some kind of innocent weather balloon that was just floating in the air. We know they had control over its speed and direction and we believe it was conducting surveillance at hypersensitive military sites within the United States,” he said.
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