Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance is ‘not just regional but global’, a Western overreach that will be dangerous and destabilising
September 24, 2024
In politics and war, delusion often sounds like vision. Jens Stoltenberg certainly has “that vision thing”, as the late George H.W. Bush once derisively called it.
If the retiring Nato chief is anything to go by, and I hope not, the biggest military alliance in history with “North Atlantic” in its title is about to go global.
Is this Western alliance about to expand into the East? If so, what do you call that? Western imperialism redux?
This article was first printed by the South China Morning Post on September 24, 2024
In his parting gift for world peace or rather world war, Stoltenberg said in an interview with Foreign Policy, which is itself an undeclared information organ of Washington’s security and foreign policy elites, that North Korea, China and Iran are all in league with Russia, and Nato must be an ally of its Asian counterparts.
ASEAN nations? I think they pretty much have already said NO, in capital letters. But who’s to say?
“Our security is global,” Stoltenberg declared. “While Nato is a regional alliance, we need a global approach, and that includes also our approach to China. Because again, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that our security is not regional.
“That’s the reason why … Nato has stepped up further the cooperation we have with our Asia-Pacific partners, that includes [sic] South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.”
He insists there is a de facto alliance between Moscow and Beijing, even though there is little evidence of it.
“That’s not because Nato has pushed them together,” he claimed. “It’s because they align in standing of what they believe in a different world order.”
Russia under Vladimir Putin is certainly anti-Western, but China under President Xi Jinping is not. What’s that charge from Washington and Brussels about China’s overproduction and dumping all its cheap stuff on Western markets? It looks like China still wants to sell to the West, despite all those tariffs and sanctions!
Well, tell that to Stoltenberg, the guy really has a one-track mind. Or rather he is paid to think that way. But at least he is upfront about it, unlike his also retiring boss in Washington, US President Joe Biden.
The press has taken to calling it, politely, the octogenarian president’s “hot mic” moment, though it seems more like, forgive me for being rude, a senior moment.
Before he had a closed-door meeting with prime ministerial partners of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) – Anthony Albanese of Australia, Narendra Modi of India and Fumio Kishida of Japan – in his home state of Delaware at the weekend, the White House was telling the press that the Quad leaders were having a get-together among allies and did not have any agenda at this time against any specific country.
But in the leaders’ private meeting, Biden or his minders forgot to turn off the tiny microphone attached to his suit. It appeared as soon as they sat down, Biden started complaining about China.
“China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits [sic],” he was heard saying.
“He’s [Xi Jinping] also looking to buy himself some diplomatic space, in my view, to aggressively pursue China’s interest.”
Of course, everyone knows the Quad was all about China from day one, so you wonder why the White House even bothered to claim otherwise for the latest meeting.
It’s unclear, though, what Biden was hoping to achieve with the Quad meeting, considering that both he and Kishida – whose poll ratings are even lower than those of the US president – are lame ducks.
Perhaps the elderly leader of the free world was hoping to go out with a bang, which he kind of did with his hot mic.
Meanwhile, in an interview that covers a range of issues, Stoltenberg also said, interestingly, that Ukraine’s path to Nato was “irreversible”. So, having denied it all along, Stoltenberg has finally agreed with Putin.
Isn’t that the rationale for Putin’s invasion – that is, against Nato expansion into Russia’s southwestern fronts despite the West’s promise not to do it? Isn’t that the ultimate reason for the Russian war in Ukraine? Should Ukrainian neutrality be a reasonable compromise for a workable peace plan?
But even Stoltenberg now admits the West has failed over Russia.
“The Western maximum-pressure campaign against Russia after 2022 has failed in its basic purpose of compelling Moscow to relent its invasion of Ukraine,” he said, “but it has successfully severed Russia from the Western economic and political sphere in a way that greatly increased its commercial and diplomatic dependence on China.”
Umm, that does sound like Nato and the West have “pushed them together”, does it not?
But what is Stoltenberg really saying? Failed in the West, double down on the East. That’s a typical time-tested American strategy – doubling down on failures, and what is Nato but a front for the Pentagon?
While I sincerely hope his replacement, former prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte, will have more sense, it probably won’t make much difference. This Nato delusion of Stoltenberg’s is starting to look very collective.
Notes
You may find these three pages from the NATO homepage interesting in relation to the above excellent analysis of NATO’s expansion to the East:
