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Comment by inawarminister | Hacker News Reader

>Sending balloons i to the airspace of other countries makes china's intention undeniable: they do not care for any rules-based international system

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-u-2-spy...

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60+ years ago, almost beyond living memory. Comparing the military/intelligence realities of the early cold war to now is tenuous at best. If anything, such historical incidents made everyone realize then the need for rules-based international order.

I think it's very idealistic to assume that the us has moved to accept rule of law or limitations when it comes ones to foreign policy and spying. We've had a sufficient examples (prism, renditionS, etc)

Weeeeellll, US recon flights are basically continuously skirting the edge of China's airspace. Though there doesn't appear to be evidence of them straight up flying over Chinese airspace (at least by international definitions), this is also only what we know of publicly. U2s were flying over Soviet and Israeli airspace for something like four of five years until they were publicly revealed by the 1960 shootdown of one (read the history of the plane on the wikipedia page[0]).

2018: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/politics/south-china-sea-flyo...

2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/asia/china-us-u-2-spy-plane-i...

2021: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39890/did-an-rc-135-sp...

2022: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/air-force-rc-135u-elec...

2022: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/politics/chinese-fighter-jet-...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

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