By targeting China in its official summit statement for the first time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is attempting to disrupt the relative peaceful seas in the Western side of the Pacific.
At the end of its summit on June 30, NATO unveiled its “Strategic Concept” in which it said that the allies face systemic competition from those “who challenge our interests, security, and values and seek to undermine the rules-based international order”. Strangely it named China among the challenges though the country is far away in Asia.
For some time US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have spared no effort in accusing Beijing of undermining the rules-based order, and rallying allies against China. The Biden/Blinken’s war team had initiated rumors throughout the summit that China would take its renegade province of Taiwan by force and expand its military throughout Asia and the Pacific.
Nothing could be further from the truth. All NATO countries recognize that Taiwan is part of China and that there is only one China in the world. If Spain is allowed to keep Catalonia and the United States keeps Hawaii, China should under the same logic have every right to keep Taiwan within Chinese territory, though it keeps prioritizing peaceful means.
It is the US that keeps selling arms to Taiwan authorities, sending legislators and military representatives to visit the island and backing up Taiwan politicians’ moves toward independence, which itself marks the breaking of Washington’s own promise to respect China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
China is not an aggressor and there is no evidence provided by the US, the European Union or NATO that China has done what NATO did more than once. It is all scaremongering by the US.
In contrast, it is the US-led NATO that invaded Iraq with falsified information and then attacked Afghanistan with controversial, if not false, grounds, not to mention NATO strikes against a number of other countries over past decades.
Contrary to the NATO statement, it is the US and NATO that keep challenging the security and interests of Russia and China. NATO leaders’ promises of not expanding the alliance to Eastern Europe in the 1990s were soon trampled by NATO’s five rounds of expansion against Russia. Now, by drawing Finland in, it is coming right to the doorstep of Russia along a border of thousands of miles.
And it is NATO members, mainly the US, the United Kingdom and Germany, which sent warships to China’s offshore last year; it is the US and its allies that have conducted military drills around China repeatedly; it is NATO member Canada that recently flew reconnaissance military planes thousands of miles to offshore China.
Worse, instead of stopping their provocations, NATO members stated that they are scheduling more military operations close to China’s seas, not to forget crying the “China threat” at the same time.
The rest of the world sees clearly that China has always advocated peace, not war; and diplomacy, not conflict. In this regard China is on the same page as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who said she believes diplomacy is a far better alternative to armed conflict.
The NATO Strategic Concept even accuses China of deepening its partnership with Russia in attempts to “subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains”.
This statement of NATO is more than hypocritical. NATO itself is a group for close partnership, why should it ban others from forming a partnership? And how can NATO’s European members so easily forget how US agencies stealthily stole information from European powers or placed their leaders under spy watch?
It is understood that Europeans, New Zealand and Australia are under US pressure. When Ardern had to join the US-led choir, during the summit, in condemning China for being more assertive and more willing to “challenge international rules and norms”, she was apparently speaking against her will, because on July 1, she stressed that New Zealand’s foreign policy was “fiercely independent” and relied on using multilateral institutions.
Instead of viewing China as a threat in the Pacific, Ardern told the prestigious foreign policy think tank Chatham House in London that “China has been a partner in aid and development projects in our regions for many years and it’s wrong for us to call out the increased presence when we welcome engagement on the Pacific region’s terms from others”.
Among all the world leaders attending the NATO summit in Madrid last month, one woman — the New Zealand prime minister — stood out from the rest for independent thought. Meanwhile, it was a pity that the new Australia leader, Anthony Albanese, willingly or not, was repeating the words of his predecessor.
NATO has been used by the US in a China-bashing exercise without any foundation. The entire statement reeks of US rhetoric designed to extend the organization’s reach to Asia by falsely making China a challenge, likely and sadly at the cost of regional peace and livelihoods.
The author, a former chief information officer of the Hong Kong government, is a veteran journalist and PR and media consultant.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.