Biden to speak with Xi Jinping following spy balloon shoot-down

President Joe Biden said Thursday that he will demand answers from Beijing about the intrusion of a Chinese surveillance balloon into U.S. airspace — and that he plans to get them straight from Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“I expect to be speaking with President Xi and I hope we are going to get to the bottom of this,” Biden said during an afternoon televised address. He also pledged that U.S. diplomats will raise the issue with their Chinese counterparts and pursue accountability.

The president stressed that he has no regrets over ordering the U.S. military to destroy the balloon, which it did on Feb. 4. “I make no apologies for taking down that balloon," he said.

The strong statements suggest that the administration is in no hurry to turn the page on the incident and will likely use it as a point of diplomatic leverage over Beijing.

Biden suggested in an interview with NBC immediately following his speech that the incident gives him an advantage in his dealings with Xi. “I think the last thing that Xi wants is to fundamentally rip the relationship with the United States and with me," Biden said.

Biden implicitly framed the international response to the spy balloon incident as a victory of U.S. efforts to rally support for his administration’s vision of a “rules-based international order” opposed to authoritarian China’s growing economic, diplomatic and military heft. “We briefed our diplomatic partners and our allies around the world and…some of them have also raised their current concerns directly with China,” Biden said in the speech.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, was working to downplay the incident and get the U.S. to soften its tone.

The U.S. should “stop stressing the importance of communication and dialogue while fueling tensions and escalating the crisis,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a press briefing on Thursday. Wang called the intrusion “unexpected and isolated” and urged bilateral ties shift to “the track of sound and steady development.”

That could be too little, too late after Beijing’s recent strident comments. On Monday, Wang said the U.S. downing of the balloon – which Beijing insists was a civilian craft for meteorological data collection – was “a trigger-happy overreaction.” Wang then berated the U.S. as “the No.1 surveillance country” and accused the U.S. of flying high-altitude balloons above China, an allegation the Biden administration quickly rejected.

The refusal of Chinese Minister of Defense Wei Fenghe to answer a phone call from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin the day the military shot down the balloon has also hardened the attitude of senior Democratic lawmakers. "It’s irresponsible not to answer the hotline phone when our head of the Department of Defense, Secretary Austin, is calling to make sure we don’t have any unintended consequences,” Sen. Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview with MSNBC on Thursday.

Beijing has good reason to be concerned. The diplomatic and political blowback for the Chinese spy balloon intrusion has been intense. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing. The House passed a bipartisan resolution last week condemning the incursion as a “brazen violation of U.S. sovereignty," while the Senate passed two similar resolutions on Wednesday. Wang at the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson dismissed that congressional outrage as “meant to score political points and dramatize the situation.”

Senior U.S. and Chinese officials may meet in person as soon as this weekend and the balloon incident will likely be top of their agenda. Blinken and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, may have a meeting on the sidelines of the three-day Munich Security Conference opening Friday, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Neither side has confirmed the meeting.

On the Hill, Biden’s delay in addressing the nation about the incident evoked GOP ire. “After days of silence, we are still left with more questions than answers,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.). He slammed Biden for having “consistently failed to emphasize just how serious these events are.”

As for three other objects the U.S. military shot down last weekend, Biden said in his speech that the intelligence community believes these objects were "most likely balloons" involving private companies and scientific research. "Nothing right now suggests they were related to China's spy balloon program" or from any other country, he said.

Still, senior GOP lawmakers weren’t satisfied with what they said was a lack of substantive detail from the administration. “The responses we have received so far have not provided nearly enough clarity as to why and how a massive spy balloon was allowed to traverse much of the continental United States over several days,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for greater transparency and for Biden to explain the military's rationale for the multiple shoot-downs and the policy moving forward.

Biden added in his address that his team will be creating parameters to deal with aerial objects. He said these parameters will be shared with Congress when completed, but will remain classified so that “we don’t give a road map to our enemies to try to evade our defenses.”

“Going forward, these parameters will guide what actions we will take when responding to unmanned and unidentified aerial objects,” Biden said. “We’re going to keep adapting them as the challenges evolve, if it evolves.” Biden also said he directed national security adviser Jake Sullivan to “lead a governmentwide effort” to prepare the U.S. to “deal safely and effectively with the objects in our airspace.”

These efforts include creating an accessible and updated inventory of unmanned objects in U.S. airspace, implementing measures to improve the ability to detect those objects, and updating the rules regarding launching and maintaining aerial craft, Biden said. Blinken will also work to establish global norms on the issue, he said.