NATO must organize and prepare for long-term competition with China’s ruling communist regime, according to the Western military alliance’s top diplomat.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) continued military modernization and infiltration of infrastructure projects around the world are the greatest long-term threats to international peace and stability, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says.
“We must organize ourselves for enduring competition with China,” Mr. Stoltenberg stated during a Feb. 1 talk at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank.
“China is modernizing its military and developing new weapons without any transparency or any limitation. It is trading unfairly, buying up critical infrastructure, bullying its neighbors, not least Taiwan, and seeking to dominate the South China Sea.”
Mr. Stoltenberg added that China’s communist leadership was increasingly coordinating with Russia, Iran, and North Korea as part of a wider attempt to create “an alternative world order where U.S. power is diminished, NATO is divided, and smaller democracies are forced to kneel.”
NATO Waking Up to China Threat
Mr. Stoltenberg said that NATO leaders had helped the rest of Europe to better understand the challenges posed by the CCP, though he noted they were slow to accept the extent of the threat. To that end, he acknowledged the Trump administration’s 2017 shift in China policy as a wake-up call that has stirred the alliance to action.
“Europe made a mistake to rely on Russian oil and gas,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “We cannot repeat that same mistake with China. Dependencies make us vulnerable.”
He acknowledged that the United States had been “right” to criticize NATO members in Europe for not investing enough in defense. That’s changing now, he said, with defense expenditures higher across the board and some nations, such as Poland, spending higher percentages of their GDP than even the United States on defense.
“NATO is an incredibly powerful idea that advances U.S. interests and multiplies America’s power,” he said.
Biden Admin Seeks Competition, Cooperation with China
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan also spoke on the issue of China last week, underscoring the administration’s position that China presents a “pacing challenge,” but complete decoupling from its economy isn’t feasible.“We determined that [China] was the only state with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” he said during a talk hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
“We are clear-eyed about the competitive structural dynamics in our relationship with [China], but we are also keenly aware that the United States and [China] are economically interdependent and share interests in addressing transnational problems.”
Mr. Sullivan highlighted the Biden administration’s China strategy of “invest, align, compete,” and emphasized that the nation should focus on building alliances of lasting mutual benefit rather than merely countering China.
“We cannot treat the rest of the world as proxy battlegrounds the way that I think the U.S. and Soviet Union too often did during the Cold War.”
