This year marks the 75th anniversary of NATO's establishment, andthe NATO Summit kicked off on July 9, local time, in Washington. The US called it "the most ambitious summit since the end of the Cold War", although the agenda this year, like in the past three years, is nothing new or ambitious.
At the press conference prior to the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the organization needs to work closely with its "Indo-Pacific partners" to stand against China and certain other countries. The media widely believe that NATO is using China as an excuse to put its fingers in the Asia-Pacific and maintain US-style hegemony .
As a Cold War vestige and the world's largest military bloc, NATO since day one has been nothing but a tool used by the US to stir up bloc confrontation and control and exclude other countries. When the US has shifted its global strategic gravity to the Asia-Pacific and taken China as a strategic rival in the past decade and more, NATO has been following closely in hopes of reaching beyond the European borders and extending its antenna to the Asia-Pacific region. That is a very dangerous tendency.
In recent years, the NATO summits have released statements hyping up the so-called "China threat", trying to portray it as an "imaginary enemy" and coerce Asia-Pacific countries to pick sides. Leaders of Japan, ROK, Australia and New Zealand are regularly attending NATO summits. The US, together with some NATO members, is hyping up the South China Sea issue, the Taiwan question, and the so-called "freedom of navigation", and fanning up confrontation among Asian-Pacific countries, all to pave the way for them to meddle in regional affairs in military ways more quickly.
But the fact is that it is very difficult for NATO to form a "ring of encirclement" against China in Asia, much less possible to build the so-called new security architecture in the Asia-Pacific region.
First, most Asian Pacific countries will not accept or welcome that. NATO claims itself to be an alliance of shared values, whereas Asia-Pacific countries, featuring a variety of institutions and cultures, will not accept an organization that advocates Western values and the theory of institutional superiority. In the meantime, the US takes NATO as a strategic tool to maintain its hegemony, whereas the majority of Asia-Pacific countries oppose and abhor hegemony. They would never accept an organization that is likely to impose hegemony upon the region.
In reality, NATO has a bad track record of creating and instigating wars since the Cold War days. Its continuous fuel-pouring is a direct contributor to the protraction of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis. This should give a warning to Asia-Pacific countries. It's hard to imagine that NATO's strategy of expanding into the Asia-Pacific would come through in a region where opposing war and focusing on development and cooperation is a consensus.
Second, quite a few NATO members are against the organization's expansion into the Asia-Pacific. NATO's European members hope the organization could focus on Europe's own security. Traditional European powers such as Germany and France, as well as most members joining after the Cold War, have their reservations about NATO's expansion to Asia-Pacific. America's coercion of its allies out of its selfish strategies will surely arouse complaints and widen the rift within the organization.
Ironically, no matter how hard NATO tries to hype up the so-called "China threat", most of its members have maintained stable relations with China, and most Asia-Pacific countries regard China as an anchor for regional and global stability and prosperity. Even Japan, ROK, Australia and New Zealand, which seem to be quite close with NATO, can, in consideration for their own interests, hardly give up their pragmatic cooperation with China just to please the US.
No amount of fanfare and self-imposed importance can hide the fact that NATO is an organization that is out of date and out of place, that it is in deep internal and external troubles, and that it is the source of threats to global stability. Its so-called strategy of expansion into the Asia-Pacific is nothing but a ploy to stir up division, conflict and war that is solely intended to serve American hegemony. NATO is running against the historical trend and is bound to end up in failure.
Editor's note: Originally published on the CCTV news app, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
