No enemy? NATO will create one

On Monday, the eve of the NATO summit in Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called for forging a stronger common policy toward China.

For that call he gave two reasons. First, he blamed China for a "crackdown" in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and "oppression" in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Second, he said China does not share NATO values.

This is exactly like what another group of Western politicians said at the just-concluded G7 summit. It seems that Western politicians have exhausted all their creativity in blaming China and run out of ideas, so they have to repeat the same decades-old talk to match their decades-old call to contain China.

The fact that these words came from the NATO secretary-general is especially interesting. NATO always needs an imaginary enemy to legalize its existence and it is always in search of one. During the Cold War there was the Soviet Union. In the 1990s there was the then Yugoslavia. In 2011 there was Libya. For the past decade they have been aiming at China.

None of these countries threatened NATO or its members a bit. NATO just needs them to be an imaginary enemy so as to continue existing.

But NATO will learn a lesson from wrongly targeting China. First, China, as the world's second largest economy, is never easy prey for any wolf. It is capable of, and determined to, counter any threat or extortion and those daydreaming about disintegrating China from within should give up earlier.

Second, a strong, prosperous China benefits the world. For the past decade alone, China has taken the lead in founding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launched the Belt and Road Initiative, and raised the concept of a community of shared destiny for humankind. China's peaceful rise is good news for the world, instead of a challenge to any power.

By imposing their role of imaginary enemy upon China, NATO is hurting the interests of the whole world, its own members included. And the only side that benefits is NATO itself, because it finds an excuse to continue existing and spending the $2.5 billion collected from Western taxpayers' pockets.

As early as 2019, Macron said that NATO is "brain dead". Maybe the situation is not that grave, but at least we are sure it is "brain lame".

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