Beijing’s nightmare is coming true. China is Nato’s new communist target
- The bickering by Macron and Trump distracted from the real development at Nato’s UK summit: a focus on Beijing’s growing military clout
- Nato has always needed a common enemy and communist target. In China, it has both
The alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps – the US-led Western Bloc and Soviet Union-led Eastern Bloc – formalised the global rivalry of the post-World War II period and involved an arms race that endured throughout the cold war. But since the break-up of the Warsaw Pact on March 31, 1991, following the worldwide collapse of socialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nato’s reason for being – and its subsequent expansion during the late 1990s to include former Soviet satellite states – has been widely questioned.
However, as member states celebrated its 70th anniversary at a golf resort in Watford on the outskirts of London this month, Nato seemed to have found something to legitimise its existence once more. Another rising communist power is now in its sights: China.
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However, Western diplomats and strategists are increasingly anxious over the threat posed by China’s rising clout, especially amid what they see as a shift by the communist state to embrace more suppressive policies domestically and more assertive policies overseas. They have been caught off guard over the possible formation of an anti-West semi-military alliance between the world’s two greatest authoritarian powers.
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It is under such circumstances that this year’s Nato summit saw significant policy shifts. It now has its eyes on China. This was confirmed when Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said China was on Nato’s agenda, as Beijing’s growing military capabilities had “implications for all allies”. The alliance needed to take “into account that China is coming closer to us”, he said.
But the relationships between China and the various Nato members vary widely and individual members of Nato are divided over the group’s strategy.
It might take time for Nato to develop a coordinated China policy as its members’ strategic priorities and core national interests vary to some degree. While Washington’s focus is on the Indo-Pacific, EU nations’ concerns about China are more about perceived economic, technological and cybersecurity threats.
When Barack Obama announced his “pivot to Asia” strategy in 2012, under which two thirds of the US navy’s assets were to be deployed to the Asia-Pacific region, many of Nato’s European members saw Washington’s strategic shift as the last nail in the coffin of the increasingly fractious group.
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Now most of them share Washington’s concerns about the rising threat. In the past couple of years, Washington and Brussels have moved closer in their strategy to deal with China. When the US identified China as a strategic competitor in its National Security Strategy last year, the 28-member European Commission, of which 22 nations are also Nato members, followed suit, with its “EU-China Strategic Outlook” plan simultaneously identifying China as “an economic competitor, and a systemic rival”.
Nato’s partner countries include most of the free democracies in Asia, such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, all of whom have long sought Nato’s assistance to keep in check China’s growing military clout. Nato is expected to upgrade its cooperation with both its Indo-Pacific partners and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain.
All this suggests there has been a landmark change in the group’s strategy and that Nato no longer sees Russia as the dominant threat. The big message from the summit is that Nato leaders reaffirmed their “solemn commitment as enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty that an attack against one ally shall be considered an attack against us all”.
Beijing’s worst nightmare is that the world’s most powerful military alliance has shifted its focus eastward, beyond the Atlantic and Indian oceans towards the South and East China seas, and that its gaze has landed on the last major communist power as its new chief adversary. ■
Cary Huang is a veteran China affairs columnist, having written on the topic since the early 1990s