NATO has just wrapped up a controversial summit in the Lithuanian capital featuring intensive talks on deterrence, defence, and demonizing China.
In a communique, the U.S.-led military bloc mentioned China 15 times, and for the first time in more than a decade, singled out China by name in its so-called Strategic Concept document. The second largest economy’s policies were labeled as ”coercive” and its cyber operations ”malicious.”
Nearly a year ago, NATO was smearing China with ”coercive diplomacy” rhetoric when the bloc itself had been busy coercing other countries to take sides in the Ukraine crisis. This time, it is framing China as a ”systemic challenge” to the alliance, when the bloc itself poses a major systemic challenge to world peace and stability and when the wording itself constitutes systemic lying.
Time and again, expansionists within the alliance have been rehashing the ”China-threat” hyperbole as a handy political instrument to manufacture fear, issue sanctions and whip up ideological confrontation to serve their own geopolitical agendas. […]
”In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver,” the New York Times commented in a recent opinion piece.
That is a huge bargain for Washington, because ”far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap. U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s annual budget — less than 6 percent by a recent estimate,” it said. Läs artikel