NATO’s Focus on China Harkens Back
To the Belligerent Alliance’s Early Days
Yves Engler / Antiwar.com
(July 19, 2024) — At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, DC, last week China was a big part of the agenda. The NATO summit’s final declaration mentioned the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 14 times. It noted that “the PRC continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security” and China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.”
The leaders of NATO “partner” nations Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia attended the summit. They collectively met NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to map out strategy for the Asia Pacific region.
NATO announced four new joint projects with countries that are important to Washington’s bid to establish an anti-China military bloc. In response, Beijing accused NATO of “inciting bloc confrontation and hyping up regional tensions”.
Unsurprisingly, NATO frames its focus on China as defensive. “The PRC has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine”, claimed the summit’s final communique. According to this storyline, Chinese relations with Russia threaten NATO. But this is exaggerated.
China has taken a cautious approach to Russia’s war largely complying with (illegal) US sanctions and refusing to sell arms (though its companies sell some dual use products to Russian firms). Conversely, North Korea and Iran are selling Russia arms while NATO countries are donating large amounts of weapons to Ukraine.
Comparing Chinese ties to India’s highlights NATO’s exaggeration. India is buying more oil and weapons from Russia than China and when NATO began its meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin.
In 2022, NATO released a strategic concept listing China for the first-time. It labeled Beijing a challenge to the alliance’s “interests, security and values” and at the time Stoltenberg declared, “China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, threatening Taiwan….”
This is all part of the US empire’s bid to contain China’s rise. Washington has become obsessed with an emerging “peer competitor” that may eventually rival its power.
While it seems strange that an alliance to defend the ‘north Atlantic’ should target a faraway Asian state, NATO is neither defensive nor only about the north Atlantic. The alliance’s recent wars in Afghanistan and Libya demonstrate that it’s a tool to enable US-led global domination.
Canada’s external affairs minister Lester Pearson.
That’s been clear for 75 years. As part of the Parliamentary debate over NATO’s founding Canada’s external affairs minister Lester Pearson said: “There is no better way of ensuring the security of the Pacific Ocean at this particular moment than by working out, between the great democratic powers, a security arrangement the effects of which will be felt all over the world, including the Pacific area.”
Two years later, he said: “The defense of the Middle East is vital to the successful defense of Europe and north Atlantic area.” In 1953, Pearson went even further: “There is now only a relatively small [5000 kilometer] geographical gap between southeast Asia and the area covered by the North Atlantic treaty, which goes to the eastern boundaries of Turkey.”
Pearson believed that the newly created ‘defensive’ alliance justified sending 27,000 Canadian troops to Korea. In a history of the 1950-53 US-led Korean war David Bercuson writes that Canada’s external minister “agreed with [President] Truman, [Secretary of State] Dean Acheson, and other American leaders that the Korean conflict was NATO’s first true test, even if it was taking place half a world away.”
The Korean War was partly a reaction to Mao’s 1949 communist/nationalist revolution in China. After US forces approached its border, China intervened. The war left around three million dead.
In reality, NATO was established to bring a decolonizing world under the US geopolitical umbrella. This remains true 75 years later as the alliance continues to advance US hegemony.
Yves Engler’s latest book is Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy.
