arthel: absolutely. chad pergram, thank you, as always. we ll talk to you again within the hour. thank you, chad. i m going to toss it over to mike now. mike: christian whiton, former state department official in the george w. bush and donald trump administrations joins us now and, christian, welcome. what s happening at the state department when things like this happen? well, they re busy sort of picking up the scraps from the secretary of state s abandoned tripp to china. they had been building trip to china. they had been building up this argument to engage china more. china hadn t done a lot to deserve greater engagement, but the national security council and the state department have been saying, well, we want there to be a baseline below which our relations with china cannot fall behind the scenes here, john kerry, the climate envoy has been somewhat desperate to get over to china and to get the deal of the century out of the
mode. mike: you ve heard about the pivot to asia since, i think, the obama administration. christian whiton, thank you very much for your time. thank you. mick mike arthel? arthel: thank you, guys. former u.s. air force assistant vice chief of staff lieutenant general richard newton joins us now. and understand that we re getting information from, through our lucas tomlinson from representative fry saying that it appears it was an f-22 out of langley. your response to that. well, that wouldn t surprise me. again, our hats off to our men and women serving in the united states military and especially to our airmen flying out of shaw. could have been an f-16 or an f-22 using its 20 millimeter, i suspect, internal gun. i think regardless, the united states air force in this case shot the balloon down and, hopefully, we re going to be able to recover it. but we ve got some challenges ahead of us as many on this call
satellites or from their extensive network of human intelligence that exists in the united states. unfortunately. so probably not a big difference. and alaska, huge parts of it are not particularly tense hi populated, that s true of canada, also true of the northern u.s., but, you know, just not understanding exactly where this will impact probably, you know, the military made a good decision to play it safe. mike: christian, this is obviously a provocative act. do to you imagine at senior levels of our united states government they re discussing potential provocative responses? i yeah, i don t think so they re going to react more. i think they consider this a provocative response, and i m worried they think this lets them off the hook for a tougher policy on china overall. there are people in the administration, the administration is not monolithic and, frankly, the president himself has said some pretty tough things on taiwan at least three times. he says the united states would
contribution to tracking and analysis of the balloon through norad as it transitioned north america. today s deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that president biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the american people first while responding effectively to the prc s unacceptable violation of our sovereignty. christian, your response to that, your thoughts on that and what does the administration do now as it relates to china? i think all of that is fine and well and, yes, because it s difficult to predict exactly where an impact will happen, we saw how long it took this thing to actually fall out of the sky once it was pierced. and even if it s over a sparse wily populated place, it may still end up hitting someone. i really do hope we re able to collect whatever this is from the sea floor, the sea surface if we re there on time, because it ll be interesting to see why china took this step. but again, i would go back to this looks like a