US and NATO deliberately bark up the wrong tree to justify their aggressive posture in Asia: China Daily editorial

The joint news conference given by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday in Washington served to show the extent to which the outgoing head of the transatlantic security alliance has been in the US pocket over the past 10 years and the lengths the two parties are willing to go to in a bid to peddle an alternative reality in pursuit of their shared agenda.

According to Blinken, collective defense as practiced by NATO is a deterrence, and "the best way to prevent war from occurring in the first place". For Stoltenberg, by "standing together, we prevent war and preserve peace". Which would sound well and good, except the biggest conflict in Europe since the end of World War II was the elephant standing beside them trumpeting the lie of such claims.

Although he meant it in another way, Blinken probably voiced a truth when he thanked Stoltenberg for his 10-year tenure, saying "This would not have happened without your leadership".

The head of NATO has always been a loyal linchpin of the US' warmongering schemes for NATO, as shown by his readiness to echo the US' false propaganda that China is "fueling Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine". This is deflection from the real reason the conflict has erupted, which Blinken also inadvertently made clear when he said "We're growing our defense industrial bases". Something that the US is compelled to do since that is where its true national security economic dependency lies.

Which is a primary reason why, contrary to the false-versus-fact revisionism of NATO, Russia's overtures to join the organization were repeatedly rebuffed and it was instead ever more firmly positioned as a threat. It is also why the organization is now adopting the same aggressive posture toward China. Blinken's warning that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida may have said it best when he remarked "what's happening in Ukraine today may well be happening in East Asia tomorrow" was again significant, but not in the way he intended. Stoltenberg loyally playing his part, said that China cannot "have it both ways" between the West and Russia, and threatened that if China does not change its course, "there should be consequences".

It is the US and its NATO allies' support that has turned Ukraine into a bloody crucible in which to hammer Russia in a prolonged war of attrition. It is clear that the architects of the conflict also have blueprints drawn up for a similar scenario in Asia. The US continues to fabricate and reinforce wrong perceptions of the root cause of the Ukraine crisis. It has never been genuinely committed to defusing the conflicts.

Smearing China will not help end the Ukraine crisis any sooner. It will only lay bare the hypocrisy of the US-led NATO and show how it is itching to light another fuse in Asia.