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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss the Chinese spy balloon and what it means for America. Watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On the Biden Administration’s balloon blame game:
“The Chinese have been innovating for a while, they’ve used [balloons] a couple of times [before]…. But they have never, ever crossed the entire continental United States, flying over places like where Strategic Command is based.
“These balloons…[operate] in that space between where satellites operate and where a spy plane could operate. These things become very useful, especially if you have a lot of them, which is what it seems like the Chinese are trying to innovate. What do they have on them? The ability to take in real time video, high resolution photographs potentially as well, and capture electronic communications. And they can loiter. That’s the advantage. It’s cheap…. Imagine the middle of a war, one of these things in the Pacific, being able to take real time footage and feed it back of what’s going on on the ground and what’s going on in the sea and so forth.
“The notion that somehow this has been happening all along, it’s just not true. People were spotting this thing with a naked eye. They were seeing it, they were calling in. They had to warn people in South Carolina not to try to shoot it down on their own, because it was visible to people.
“[The Biden Administration is] just being dishonest…. The reason is I think they were caught off guard and did not respond appropriately. Now they’re scrambling for answers and to deflect blame.”
On the message sent by the balloon:
“The Chinese continue to develop and innovate new capabilities, including ones that appear really rudimentary and pretty simplistic, but actually could be quite effective. But the most important point is they felt bold enough to fly this thing entering over Idaho, through Montana, the Midwest of the United States. It literally cut a diagonal path right across the middle of the continental US. That’s never happened before….
“In my view, it was sending a message to the world, and that is: ‘Look, we can fly these things over the airspace of the United States, and they can’t or won’t do anything about it. So what makes you think they’re going to do anything anywhere in the world? They’re a hollow superpower.’ That’s the Chinese argument. That’s the point they’re making tonight to the world.”
On why the Biden Administration didn’t shoot down the balloon immediately:
“That’s a great question and one they should answer. The trajectory of it [the balloon] was pretty clear.… They were tracking it…. They had multiple options to bring it down.
“I’m not saying detonate this thing over a major US city or a populated area. If this thing’s the size of three city buses and lands in the wrong place, it’s going to hurt people. But they had other options to bring it down.
“By the way, the Chinese could have also moved this thing. They didn’t feel like they needed to. This thing probably has a self-destruct mechanism. They didn’t feel any need to do that…. I hope it wakes people up to the fact that we are now engaged…in a full scale geopolitical competition with the Chinese. They’re playing to win, and we’re over here messing around with a lot of silly stuff and backtalk that isn’t addressing the fundamental issue of the 21st century.”