KT McFarland, former deputy National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump, called the flight of the Chinese spy balloon over much of the United States a "Sputnik moment," telling Newsmax on Monday that the U.S. must become serious about confronting Beijing's desire for international power.
"This should be our Sputnik moment," McFarland said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "This should be where the United States realizes, everybody in the United States — Republicans, Democrats, independents, people who don't even care about politics — where we realize China has, indeed, crossed over."
McFarland said China has "every intention of replacing us as the dominant world power, either peacefully or by war, and they are going to do it every way they can. And what are we doing? We are sort of asleep at the wheel. We have to become very serious."
McFarland also said it was strange the Biden administration said Chinese spy balloons also flew over the U.S. during the Trump administration.
She said most of the senior Trump defense and security alumni have been talking to each other about the issue over the past few days.
"We've said to each other, 'Did you ever know anything about this violation of American airspace by China? And everybody, everybody said, 'No, we did not know anything about it,'" McFarland said.
McFarland said "this leads to three conclusions: Did these unnamed defense department officials just lie to give the Biden Administration cover or, number two, did the Pentagon see these spy balloons in the Trump Administration and not say anything at all to the civilian leadership, they were just going to keep us all in the dark. Or, number three, which is equally upsetting, maybe they did not really have the capability during the Trump administration to see these balloons and only recently pieced it together one way or another."
McFarland emphasized that "all three of these are horrible results: because either, one, you have a politically compromised Pentagon, or number two, you have a politically compromised Pentagon to the extent that they are not even going to let civilian leaders know what's going on. Or number three, they are just so incompetent.
"With almost a trillion dollars a year on defense and intelligence expenditures, do we not know when our airspace is violated by a slow moving balloon going over the entire country?"
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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