A view of an almost empty street in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb 25, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]
By "We have seen that China is unwilling to condemn Russia's aggression, and Beijing has joined Moscow in questioning the right of nations to choose their own path," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg after a meeting on April 7. He also called it "a serious challenge to us all".
Would anybody please tell Stoltenberg that by saying so he is questioning the very right of China to choose its own path? China is neither a member of NATO nor of the Western alliance in any sense of the word, and it has the right to say words and take actions according to its own national interests in international affairs.
So why force China to join the West in condemning Russia? Why should China follow the path of NATO and Western nations on the issue?
The words of Stoltenberg expose that he and his organization are still trapped in a "diode mentality", namely seeing the world in only two extremes, either for them or against them. Concerning the Ukraine crisis, they not only take Russia as the enemy, but also take any nation that does not stand with them as one.
And they are still in the old, harmful habit of imposing their own values upon others. They want every nation in the world to follow their steps like they follow the US, which will only result in a unipolar or bipolar world, like the Cold War era. As a creation of the Cold War, NATO is full of mentality of the 1960s and shows no hint of walking out of it.
It is under the guidance of that very mentality that NATO continued expanding eastward and turned Russia from an imaginary enemy into a real one. It is time they avoided repeating that mistake and turning more nations with different thinking into enemies.
By pointing his fingers at China, Stoltenberg is trying to shrug off the responsibilities of his organization instead of finding a solution to it. Unable or unwilling to extinguish the flames of war in Ukraine, he passed the buck to China to avoid letting the world see his failures, but everybody knows that it is NATO's expansion eastward that worsened the geopolitical sphere of Russia and Ukraine and led to the military conflict.
He that tied the knot is the best person to untie it. Time for Stoltenberg and the NATO to stop blaming China for their wrongs, and join China's call for the two sides to come back to the negotiation table.
So that peace can come back to Ukraine and the refugees could go back home early.
