Communist China is the primary partner to Russia in its war against Ukraine, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
“China is the main supporter of Russia’s war effort in Europe, in Ukraine,” Mr. Stoltenberg said during a virtual address to the Wilson Center think tank on June 17.
To that end, Mr. Stoltenberg added that, were Russia to achieve victory over Ukraine, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would consider the victory a license to expand its own aggression in the Indo-Pacific and possibly to initiate a conquest of democratic Taiwan.
“If you are afraid of Chinese aggression in the South China Sea or Taiwan, then you should be very concerned about Ukraine,” he said.
Far from simply sharing an authoritarian vision for a multipolar world order, Mr. Stoltenberg said that communist China’s continued support for Russia’s war included the sharing of critical technologies on a massive scale.
“Beijing is sharing high-end technologies like semiconductors and other dual use items [with Russia],” he said. “Last year, Russia imported 90 percent of its microelectronics from China used to produce missiles, tanks, and aircraft.”
“The war in Ukraine demonstrates that our security is not regional. It’s global.”
Mr. Stoltenberg added that the CCP is also working to provide Russia with improved satellite capabilities and imaging services, which could directly improve Russia’s military effectiveness on the battlefields of Ukraine.
The CCP is not the only authoritarian regime to throw its weight behind Russia’s war machine. North Korea has sent more than 1 million rounds of ammunition to Russia since September of last year, and Iran has supplied hundreds of one-way attack drones for use against Ukrainian targets.
As such, Mr. Stoltenberg said, it would be wrong to consider Chinese and Russian aggression as separate phenomena. Rather, CCP leader Xi Jinping should be seen as supporting Russia’s war explicitly because it undermined the United States and its allies.
“I think this idea that we can distinguish between the threats we see in Europe posed by Russia and the threats you see in the Asia-Pacific posed by China… is wrong.”
“For the U.S. to have NATO on board when you address the challenge of China is a huge advantage. I think that’s the point, and that’s why President Xi is so adamant against NATO. It is in his interest to weaken NATO, and therefore, it should be in the U.S. interest to strengthen it.”
The comments come ahead of a NATO summit in Washington next month, which will mark the alliance’s 75th anniversary.
The defensive alliance now has 32 member nations that all commit to collective defense through NATO’s Article Five, which ensures that an attack on any member will draw a response from all members.
For more than seven decades, that mutual assurance has deterred open war from engulfing NATO’s members in war on all but one occasion.
The only time Article Five has been invoked was in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when the United States’ NATO allies joined it in the subsequent war in Afghanistan.
Following the war in Afghanistan, the alliance began to be criticized by some in the United States, including former President Donald Trump, who frequently remarked on the European members’ relatively low investments in defense.
Since 2014, NATO members agreed to seek to reach a baseline of defense spending equal to two percent GDP. In 2014, only three NATO members met that goal.
That state of affairs is changing in the face of Russian aggression on Europe’s eastern flank, however. By the end of this year, at least 20 of the alliance’s members will have exceeded that threshold, Mr. Stoltenberg said.
“Europeans are ramping up their defense spending to record high levels,” Mr. Stoltenberg said.
“We are just safer together than we are alone… especially in a world when we are afraid not only of Russia but the security consequences of China.”
Mr. Stoltenberg said that the United States was not immune to that benefit either. Though the individual NATO members may be small in comparison to the United States, he said, the alliance as a whole more than doubled the strength of the United States.
That calculus should matter, he added, when U.S. leadership weighs its odds in a potential conflict with China.
“NATO is good for European security, but NATO is also very good for U.S. security,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “The United States is big, but it’s not that big.
“That matters. Size matters.”
