"Trial balloons."

It seems the Pentagon has floated another one.

Up, up, and away. (Famartin, cc by-SA 3.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

3 FEBRUARY—Let us think some early thoughts about the Pentagon’s announcement, reported in this morning’s dailies, that it has detected an intelligence-gathering balloon, “most certainly from the People’s Republic of China,” as the Defense Department statement put it, in the atmosphere high above Montana. Our thoughts cannot lead us to conclusions: It is too early to draw any, and we must refrain precisely because the notion of responsibility has all but disappeared from our public discourse, leaving publications such as this among the few remaining guardians of this virtue.

It is nonetheless not too soon to consider events of the past few hours so as to prepare ourselves for what we will be told in the next few.

Cui bono? translates as “To whom the good?” Or, more commonly, “Who benefits?” Cicero famously posed the question and put it in our common lexicon. If you think about it, this is a rhetorical device of use when the information available about a given event is limited: The whole is not visible. It is an exercise in tracing back according to motive. Let us bear this in mind. It is a method of inquiry readymade for our circumstances this morning, for the information we have about the Pentagon’s announcement can by no stretch be accepted as complete.