BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- NATO has just wrapped up a controversial summit in the Lithuanian capital featuring intensive talks on deterrence, defence, and demonizing China.
In a communique, the U.S.-led military bloc mentioned China 15 times, and for the first time in more than a decade, singled out China by name in its so-called Strategic Concept document. The second largest economy's policies were labeled as "coercive" and its cyber operations "malicious."
Nearly a year ago, NATO was smearing China with "coercive diplomacy" rhetoric when the bloc itself had been busy coercing other countries to take sides in the Ukraine crisis. This time, it is framing China as a "systemic challenge" to the alliance, when the bloc itself poses a major systemic challenge to world peace and stability and when the wording itself constitutes systemic lying.
Time and again, expansionists within the alliance have been rehashing the "China-threat" hyperbole as a handy political instrument to manufacture fear, issue sanctions and whip up ideological confrontation to serve their own geopolitical agendas.
Inch by inch, the hegemonic bloc, which has wantonly expanded eastward, has been eating away at the security space of those outside the bloc in pursuit of absolute security, ignoring the legitimate concerns of others and bringing them to the brink of confrontation. Now, the bloc is being used by the United States to meddle in the Asia-Pacific.
For three decades, this Cold War relic which should have disbanded long ago, presses on with a Cold War mentality as well as a divisive, anachronistic practice of creating "enemies" and engaging in bloc confrontation.
A defensive organization which touts itself as the defender of a so-called rules-based international order, the U.S.-led military bloc has instead bypassed the United Nations Security Council and waged wars against sovereign states, creating huge humanitarian disasters and displacing tens of millions.
Despite this, the regional bloc somehow remains functional, due in part to a shared security demand within Europe, but largely as a vehicle for the United States to retain its global dominance and tighten its grip on the continent as its clout fades in an increasingly multipolar world.
To this end, the United States has been gaslighting member countries with ubiquitous "challenges" and "threats," so that they are seized by a paranoia to seek lasting protection from and reliance on it. Together with its allies, Washington goes on to scare, lure, and fool others into believing China is to blame for a lot of the world's woes.
"In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver," the New York Times commented in a recent opinion piece.
That is a huge bargain for Washington, because "far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap. U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon's annual budget -- less than 6 percent by a recent estimate," it said.
Behind all this systemic brainwashing is a far vaster agenda, namely a U.S.-led world order, in which Captain America's shield serves as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy, or more recently, to kick China out of the global economic game using "decoupling" or "de-risking" tactic.
At the two-day summit, members seemed to wrangle over how to treat China and fretted about blindly following suit. Many are sobering up to a necessity for greater strategic autonomy within Europe, and are vigilant against directly confronting China.
Critics argue that the existence and influence of NATO may undermine the non-aligned and neutral status of certain countries. NATO membership restricts the foreign policy options and independence of states that prefer to maintain a neutral position in international conflicts.
With all its troublemaking, this alliance is increasingly becoming a curse rather than being a blessing to the world. There is no point to continue maintaining a bloc when all it does is widening rifts and dividing the world.
