Confrontation With China Puts West On Dangerous New Ground

NATO's dodgy geography: US-led bloc's insistence on moving on from Russia to confront China will put West on dangerous new ground

Tarik Cyril Amar

The general secretary of NATO has told the Financial Times that there's a new foe in town. After decades of sparring with the Soviet Union, and Russia, the bloc is firmly setting its sights on a different standoff – with China.

Putting aside the diplomatic niceties, his pitch is simple: NATO should turn its attention to Beijing. To put it more bluntly than Stoltenberg did, the US’ European partners should follow Washington into a new, openly-declared Cold War in East Asia.

The pitch belies the fact President Joe Biden is offering NATO members a deal they are not supposed to refuse. Either you help us in our new Cold War against China on which we have decided alone, or we will no longer help you feel safe from Russia. As Stoltenberg puts it, for America, NATO is “not something they do to be nice to Europe.” Instead, he reminds us, for Washington, allies must fit their national interests.

In other words, now that the endless 'wars on terror’ are winding down, the US has identified its new geopolitical enemy number one, Beijing. The Pentagon and the attached military-industrial complex – as president Eisenhower once called it – must be kept in business after all.

And America expects its NATO allies to go along. Otherwise, the general secretary’s implication is almost rudely clear, NATO might lose its usefulness for America. And since, it isn’t investing in the alliance to 'be nice’ but out of its own self-interest, Washington might then turn its back on it, either perhaps by demonstratively slamming the door, as former President Trump threatened to do, or quietly by simply shifting its attention, money, and military might away.

Yet there is a problem. NATO was built for a specific purpose: as its first British general secretary famously put it, to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”Whatever you think about today’s Russians and Germans, one thing is certain. A pact named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was never meant to take care of the Pacific or deal with China.

The purpose of Stoltenberg’s far-fetched, if increasingly popular, story is to convince us that that does not matter now. For him, NATO is a sort of limitless transformer: As with the ‘war on terror’, we are once again asked to forget what NATO was actually designed to do and pretend that it can do anything else as well. And how do we know what that anything else is on any given day? That’s, actually, really simple: we check with Washington.

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