NATO: by Making China the Enemy, the Alliance Is
Threatening World Peace
NATO’s new posture towards Beijing brings into
question its whole claim to be a 'defensive' alliance
by Jonathan
Cook Posted on July 11, 2022
https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2022/07/10/nato-by-making-china-the-enemy-the-alliance-is-threatening-world-peace/
As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every
problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), a
self-declared “defensive” military alliance –
so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive
military threat.
That is part of the reason why NATO issued a new
“strategic concept” document last
week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a
“systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia.
Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step
by NATO on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s
escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous
mission statement, issued in 2010, NATO advocated “a
true strategic partnership” with Russia.
According to a report in the New York Times,
China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not
been for Germany and France.
They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their
trade and technology links with China.
In response, Beijing accused NATO
of “maliciously attacking and smearing” it, and warned that
the alliance was “provoking confrontation.” Not unreasonably, Beijing believes
NATO has strayed well out of its sphere of supposed “defensive” interest: the
North Atlantic.
NATO was founded in the wake of the Second World War
expressly as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The
ensuing Cold War was primarily a territorial and ideological battle for the
future of Europe, with the ever-present mutual threat of nuclear annihilation.
So how, Beijing might justifiably wonder, does China –
on the other side of the globe – fit into NATO’s historic “defensive” mission?
How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways
they weren’t before? How are Americans or Europeans suddenly under threat of
military conquest from China?
Creating enemies
The current NATO logic reads something like
this: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in
February is proof that the Kremlin has ambitions to recreate its former Soviet
empire in Europe. China is growing its military power and has similar imperial
designs toward the rival, breakaway state of Taiwan, as well as the western
Pacific islands. And because Beijing and Moscow are strengthening their
strategic ties in the face of western opposition, NATO has to presume that
their shared goal is to bring western civilization crashing down.
Or as last week’s NATO mission statement proclaimed:
“The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and
the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the
rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”
But if anyone is subverting the “rules-based
international order,” a standard the West regularly invokes but never defines,
it looks to be NATO itself – or the US, as the hand that wields the NATO
hammer.
That is certainly the way it looks to Beijing. In its
response, China argued:
“Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [NATO] has not yet abandoned its
thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is NATO that is creating
problems around the world.”
China has a point. A problem with bureaucracies – and
NATO is the world’s largest military bureaucracy – is that they quickly develop
an overriding institutional commitment to ensuring their permanent existence,
if not expansion. Bureaucracies naturally become powerful lobbies for their own
self-preservation, even when they have outlived their usefulness.
If there is no threat to “defend” against, then a
threat must be manufactured. That can mean one of two things: either inventing
an imaginary threat or provoking the very threat the bureaucracy was designed
to avert or thwart. Signs are that NATO – now embracing 30 countries – is doing
both.
Remember that NATO should have dissolved itself after
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But three decades later, it is bigger and
more resource-hungry than ever.
Against all advice, and in violation of
its promises, NATO has refused to maintain a neutral “security buffer” between
itself and Russia. Instead, it has been expanding right up to Russia’s borders,
including creeping furtively into Ukraine, the gateway through which armies
have historically invaded Russia.
Offensive alliance
Undoubtedly, Russia has proved itself a genuine threat
to the territorial integrity of its neighbor Ukraine by conquering its
eastern region – home to a large ethnic Russian community the Kremlin claims to
be protecting. But even if we reject Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
repeated assertion that Moscow has no larger ambitions, the Russian army’s
substantial losses suggest it has scant hope of extending its military reach
much further.
Even if Moscow were hoping to turn its attention next
to Poland or the Baltic states, or NATO’s latest recruits of Sweden and Finland,
such a move would clearly risk nuclear confrontation. This is perhaps why
western audiences hear so much from their politicians and media about Putin
being some kind of deranged megalomaniac.
The claim of a rampant, revived Russian imperialism
appears not to be founded in any obvious reality. But it is a very effective
way for NATO bureaucrats to justify enlarging their budgets and power,
while the arms industries that feed off NATO and are embedded in western
capitals substantially increase their profits.
The impression that this might have been NATO’s
blueprint for handling Moscow is only underscored by the way it is now treating
China, with even less justification. China has not recently invaded any
sovereign territories, unlike the US and its allies, while the only territory
it might threaten – Taiwan – is some 12,000 kilometers from the US mainland,
and a similarly long distance from most of Europe.
The argument that the Russian army may defeat Ukraine
and then turn its attention towards Poland and Finland at least accords with
some kind of geographical possibility, however remote. But the idea that China
may invade Taiwan and then direct its military might toward California and
Italy is in the realm of preposterous delusion.
NATO’s new posture towards Beijing brings into
question its whole characterization as a “defensive” alliance. It looks very
much to be on the offensive.
Russian red lines
Notably, NATO invited to the summit for
the first time four states from the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, Japan, New
Zealand, and South Korea.
The creation of a NATO-allied “Asia-Pacific Four” is
doubtless intended to suggest to Beijing parallels with NATO’s gradual
recruitment of eastern European states starting in the late 1990s, culminating in
its more recent flirting with Ukraine and Georgia, long-standing red lines for
Russia.
Ultimately, NATO’s courting of Russia’s neighbors led
to attacks by Moscow first on Georgia and then on Ukraine, conveniently
bolstering the “Russian threat” narrative. Might the intention behind similar
advances to the “Asia-Pacific Four” be to provoke Beijing into a more
aggressive military stance in its own region, in order to justify NATO
expanding far beyond the North Atlantic, claiming the entire globe as its
backyard?
There are already clear signs of that. In May, US
President Joe Biden vowed
that the US – and by implication NATO – would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily if
it were attacked. Beijing regards Taiwan as Chinese territory some 200 kilometers off its coast.
Similarly, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called
last week for NATO countries to ship advanced weapons to Taiwan, in the same
way, NATO has been arming Ukraine, to ensure the
island has “the defense capability it needs.”
This echoes NATO’s narrative about its goals in
Ukraine: that it is pumping weapons into
Ukraine to “defend” the rest of Europe. Now, NATO is casting itself as the
guardian of the Asia-Pacific region too.
‘Economic coercion’
But in truth, this is not just about competing against military threats. There is an additional layer of western self-interest,
concealed behind claims of a “defensive” alliance.
Days before the NATO summit, the G7, a group of the
seven leading industrialized nations that form the core of NATO, announced their intention to
raise $600bn to invest in developing countries.
This move wasn’t driven by altruism. The West has been
deeply worried by Beijing’s growing influence on the world stage through its
trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative,
announced in 2013.
China is being aggressive, but so far only in
exercising soft power. In the coming decades, it plans to invest in the
infrastructure of dozens of developing states. More than 140 countries have so
far signed up for
the initiative.
China’s aim is to make itself the hub of a global
network of new infrastructure projects – from highways and ports to advanced
telecommunications – to strengthen its economic trade connections to Africa,
the Middle East, Russia, and Europe.
If it succeeds, China will stamp its economic
dominance on the globe – and that is what really worries the West, particularly
the US and its NATO military bureaucracy. They are labeling this “economic
coercion.”
This week, the heads of the FBI and MI5 – the US and
UK’s domestic intelligence services – held an unprecedented joint news conference in
London to warn that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and
national security.” Underscoring western priorities, they added that any attack
on Taiwan would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the
world has ever seen.”
Unilateral aggression
Back in the Cold War era, Washington was not just, or
even primarily, worried about a Soviet military invasion. The nuclear doctrine
of mutually assured destruction meant neither had an interest in direct
confrontation.
Instead, each treated developing nations as pawns in
an economic war over resources to be plundered and markets to be controlled.
Each side tried to expand its so-called “sphere of influence” over other states
and secure a larger slice of the planet’s wealth, in order to fuel its domestic
economy and expand its military industries.
The West’s rhetoric about the Cold War emphasized an
ideological battle between western freedoms and Soviet authoritarianism. But
whatever significance one attributes to that rhetorical fight, the more
important battle for each side was proving to other states the superiority of
the economic model that grew out of its ideology.
In the early Cold War years, it should be recalled,
communist parties were front-runners to win elections in several European
states – something that was starkly evident to
the drafters of the NATO treaty.
The US invested so heavily in weapons – today, its
military budget exceeds the combined spending of
the following nine countries – precisely to strong-arm poorer nations into its camp,
and punish those that refused. That task was made easier after the fall of the
Soviet Union. In a unipolar world, Washington got to define who would be
treated as a friend, on what terms, and who a foe.
NATO chiefly served as an alibi for US aggression,
adding a veneer of multilateral legitimacy to its largely unilateral
militarism.
Debt slavery
In reality, the “rules-based international order”
comprises a set of US-controlled economic institutions, such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, that dictate oppressive terms to
increasingly resentful poor countries – often the West’s former colonies – in
desperate need of investment. Most have ended up in permanent debt slavery.
China is offering them an alternative, and in the
process, it threatens to gradually erode US economic dominance. Russia’s
apparent ability to survive the West’s economic sanctions, while those
sanctions rebound on western economies, underscores the
tenuousness of Washington’s economic primacy.
More generally, Washington is losing its grip on the
global order. The rival BRICS group – of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa – is preparing to expand by
including Iran and Argentina in its power bloc. And both Russia and China,
forced into a deeper alliance by NATO hostility, have been seeking to overturn
the international trading system by decoupling it from the US dollar, the central pillar of
Washington’s hegemonic status.
The recently released “NATO 2030” document stresses
the importance of NATO remaining “ready, strong and united for a new era of
increased global competition.” Last week’s strategic vision listed China’s
sins as seeking “to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical
infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains.” It added that China
“uses its economic leverage to create strategic dependencies and enhance its
influence,” as though this was not exactly what the US has been doing for
decades.
Washington’s greatest fear is that, as its economic
muscle atrophies, Europe’s vital trading links with China and Russia will see
its economic interests – and eventually its ideological loyalties – shift
eastwards, rather than stay firmly in the western camp.
The question is: how far is the US willing to go to
stop that? So far, it looks only too ready to drag NATO into a military sequel
to the Cold War – and risk pushing the world to the brink of nuclear
annihilation.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special
Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel
and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle
East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. This
originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
