Stoltenberg’s Asia Trip Highlights NATO Appetite for Global Anti-China, Anti-Russia Bloc: Scholars
18:57 GMT 30.01.2023 (Updated: 12:15 GMT 06.04.2023)
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The Western bloc began its foray into the creation of ‘security partnerships’ with Asian countries in the early 2000s under the cover of the US-led global ‘war on terror’. Today, NATO is looking to deepen ties with the region on the wave of the so-called ‘China threat’. Sputnik explores the security implications of NATO’s ambitions in the region.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is on his way to Japan to meet with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials to address “the range of shared cross-regional challenges and security interests” between Tokyo and the alliance. Stoltenberg also wrapped up a two-day visit to South Korea Monday aimed at “deepening” and “strengthening” the bloc’s security ties with the key US ally. The Korea trip included talks with President Yoon Suk-yeol and Foreign Minister Park Jin, and a speech at the CHEY Institute for Advanced Studies in Seoul.
In his address at CHEY, Stoltenberg outlined a series of common “threats” to Seoul and the Western bloc, like North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine (which he sheepishly categorized simply as the “Russian war of aggression,”) and NATO’s increasingly adversarial relationship with China, in part due to Beijing's growing security cooperation with Moscow.
“Going forward, we can do more together…including to strengthen our effort on global arms control, address disarmament and non-proliferation, work on new technologies, enhance our cyber defenses, and uphold the rules-based international order,” Stoltenberg said.
The last few words of the NATO chief's comments are key. The ‘rules-based international order’ is a phrase what was bandied about by US officials ad nauseam throughout 2022 in reference to the tectonic shifts in the world order which began in the 2000s, and accelerated dramatically last February after Russia launched its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
Russian officials have questioned this ‘international order’ and just who sets its ‘rules’. According to President Putin, the construct announced by the US at the end of the Cold War really has “just one rule” – that “those in power…can live without following any rules at all and get away with anything,” while forcing their will on other nations, including billions of people in the Global South. Attempts to break with this hegemony and establish a multipolar alternative are met with trade wars, sanctions, color revolutions, and coups, according to the Russian president.
8 January 2023, 13:25 GMT
Cold Logic
Behind Stoltenberg’s warm, fuzzy rhetoric in Seoul about the defense of “freedom and democracy” are the cold, hard steel lethality of weapons, and an equally cold rational aimed at preserving American hegemony, says Joseph Camilleri, a leading Australian international relations scholar and professor emeritus at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
“Stoltenberg’s visit to Japan and South Korea has a threefold purpose: to pressure these two countries, which happen to be America’s principal allies in Asia, to provide lethal military aid to Ukraine; to reiterate the standard US position that China poses a threat to ‘Western’ values, interests and security; and to pursue the push towards the globalization of NATO by developing closer partnerships in Asia,” Dr. Camilleri told Sputnik in an interview.
To Washington, NATO is “the principle multilateral institution which it can use” both “to contain Russia’s reemergence and China’s rise on the global stage,” the scholar pointed out.
Fabio Massimo Parenti, a China specialist and associate professor of international political economy at China Foreign Affairs University and the Italian Institute Lorenzo de’Medici, concurs with that assessment.
“I would say that NATO strategy corresponds perfectly to and is guided by the United States’ strategy,” Dr. Parenti told Sputnik. "This strategy can be interpreted within the idea and the will of the new Cold War framework,” in which the military bloc can be used to advance Washington’s interests in Asia, especially efforts to “contain” China and its development.
“And so they need to strengthen ties with allies in the Asia-Pacific, in the Indo-Pacific region, with Japan, with South Korea, even though we still don’t have any concrete outcomes of this strategy,” the academic said, pointing out that the concept of a “global NATO” appears to still be under construction and has yet to be fully fleshed out.
Dr. Swasti Rao, an associate fellow at the New Delhi-based Europe and Eurasia Center at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies, told Sputnik that despite being a "relatively new dynamic," NATO's "pivot to Asia" makes sense strategically from the alliance's perspective, focusing on the concept of "indivisible security" to connect "concerns in the Transatlantic theater with those in the Indo-Pacific/Asia Pacific theater."
Pointing to a series of diplomatic overtures by Tokyo toward NATO over the last decade, Rao believes that if the North Atlantic alliance's Asia pivot "is relatively here to stay, which I think it is, Japan might become its first member outside Europe," given that the country has already recently pledged to dramatically ramp up its military spending.
"Stoltenberg's visit to Japan must be seen as a reciprocation to Japan's new set of three overhauled defense policies announced in December 2022, where China, North Korea and even Russia (in a major policy shift from the Abe era) have been listed as the top three security concerns," Rao said.
19 January 2023, 12:35 GMT
China Challenge
As mentioned by Stoltenberg in his speech in Seoul on Monday, until recently, the People’s Republic of China “was not on NATO’s agenda at all.” That changed with the addition of the PRC to the bloc’s “Strategic Concept” at its Madrid Summit last July. China is now seen as a “challenge to our values, to our interests and to our security,” Stoltenberg said.
NATO’s push to shore up ties with Asian countries, particularly those already partnering up with Washington against Beijing, makes sense as far as the US’s global strategy is concerned, Dr. Camilleri believes.
“NATO is seeking closer links with Japan, South Korea and Australia. The Australia-UK-US strategic partnership (AUKUS), and the four country network that brings together the US, Japan, Australia and India (QUAD) can be viewed as part of a larger strategy which has to develop an Asia-Pacific NATO to complement and reinforce the Altantic NATO,” the scholar said.
“This is an extremely troubling development,” according to Camilleri, because it will “almost certainly exacerbate tensions between the US on the one hand and China and Russia on the other,” and result in the escalation of a regional and global tensions, intensifying what the scholar referred to as the general “militarization of international society.”
Stressing that the key to the preservation of the global security architecture lies in policies and institutions committed to the principle of cooperative coexistence, the scholar said that the message being put out by Beijing to date rejecting ‘cold war confrontation’ constitutes the “only sensible response” for both Russia and China to pursue, “so long as words are matched by deeds.”
22 January 2023, 14:41 GMT
Flawed Strategy
Ultimately, Dr. Parenti believes Washington’s Cold War II-style approach to China using NATO is fatally flawed, as has been recognized recently even among some elements of the US political establishment, because attempts to break US-Chinese economic and technological interdependence will result in a stronger, more independent PRC.
“NATO’s focus on China is exclusively the US’s focus on China. China has become a target for the United States’ strategy – a political target, since the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s,” Parenti said. “We can summarize that the main goal of the US-NATO system on China is to confirm [its] domination in the world and try to conserve the hegemonic role that is going to be eroded during the [next] decades consistently due to multiple regional integration processes around China, around Russia and overall BRICS+ countries.”
Parenti is confident that this “domination strategy” is unlikely to be welcomed by local countries, although some may fold to US pressure or try to exploit ties with Washington to pursue their own ambitions. In any event, NATO’s expansion into the Asia Pacific is a destabilizing force, since its priorities are limited to military and security-related concerns, not economic development, the professor argues.
India at a Security Crossroads
For her part, Dr. Rao expressed concerns that NATO's Asia pivot, and the increasingly close relationship between Moscow and Beijing amid the conflict in Ukraine, are unfavorable to Delhi strategically, "because it upends India's Russia tool kit to balance China, maintain outreach in Central Asia, retain relevance in Afghanistan and also develop the trade corridor with Iran."
"Strategic autonomy is the core tenet of India's foreign policy worldview that rejects the alliance view of global geopolitics. But with the longstanding war in Ukraine, India will be forced to take a more realistic view of the fast-changing situation and responses of its friends (including Russia). The impact of the two security theaters converging is also bound to throw open some challenges to countries like India, to which [Delhi's] responses will unravel with time," she said.
In the meantime, Rao said, if NATO's overtures in Asia turn the alliance into a global pact, the inevitable response by Russia, China and North Korea will only serve to escalate tensions in the region.
