Surrendering strategic autonomy to US is real security threat to its allies

In his farewell speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday as top US diplomat, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to summarize the achievements of the Joe Biden administration under the NATO framework. But his remarks just served to expose how the administration has exploited the organization.

"In all seriousness, I am grateful to all of my colleagues here at NATO ... for an extraordinary four years, extraordinary work that we've been able to do together to strengthen the security, the well-being of all the citizens we have the privilege to represent," Blinken said.

That's a shameless lie as Europe is facing the worst security crisis in Ukraine since World War II thanks to the ugly role of the United States in prompting its outbreak and fueling its escalation.

The serious division on how to evaluate the security situations of Europe and how the Ukraine crisis should be resolved was revealed in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's Ministerial Council Meeting Plenary Session that was held in Malta on Thursday, in which Blinken also made a speech in similar tone, exposing many European countries do not buy the US tricks.

But Blinken does have enough reasons to brag about how "extraordinary" the past four years have been, though for the US only, as it has successfully incited the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict soon after former German chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement and dragged it for nearly three years until now, turning the gears of the fate of Europe's security in a direction favoring the US only.

The Ukraine crisis has undoubtedly become leverage for the US to tighten its control on Europe, nipping its awakening sense of autonomy that was once being transformed to independent foreign policies before Merkel stepped down and a means for Washington to weaken Russia and implicate China.

In particular, by smearing China as an "enabler" of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a title that suits the US, arbitrarily citing its normal trade with Russia as evidence, Washington attempts to weld together NATO and its "Indo-Pacific" security alliance. Blinken couldn't even refrain from repeating in his Wednesday valediction the cliche of how China has become a "security threat" to Europe, something he has kept saying since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis.

"Over the past four years, we've had an unprecedented convergence among allies on the challenges that China poses to transatlantic security ... But this growing convergence here in Europe on the challenges posed both by Russia and, in different ways, by China, and then growing collaboration between allies and partners in the transatlantic area and the 'Indo-Pacific', that is a hallmark of the last four years," Blinken said.

Apparently, to weave together its allies and partners in the transatlantic area and the "Indo-Pacific" has been a necessary part of the Biden administration's plan based on its "value diplomacy" so that European countries would regard the faraway China, their major trading partner, as their collective "security threat", and thereafter an economic threat that has to be de-risked of.

So the US' previous slack security network in the Asia-Pacific that featured bilateral pacts can be Natolized soon, merging into an integrated, coherent one against China to shatter the latter's traditional strengths in its "neighborhood diplomacy" in the region.

Security and economy are the two "hands" of the Biden administration's "value diplomacy" that it tries to use to squeeze China's geopolitical space in the world and sever its connections with the global economy.

Apart from that, Blinken dedicated the majority part of his speech to bragging about how the US' input in building arms, selling weapons and arming its allies and partners have strengthened their security and promoted their interests, and tried to convince his audience Ukraine can win the conflict through military means.

Yet he pretended to ignore that all of his audience are actually awaiting the incoming US administration to end the Ukraine crisis as its head promised in his election campaign, as they have long seen through that the Biden administration is not intent on ending the crisis but exploiting it for the US' narrow ends.

To make that point further clear, Blinken even felt no qualms about boasting that most of the US' aid to Ukraine has been invested in its own defense industrial base to produce weapons that Ukraine needs, "but those investments are strengthening our defense industrial base and they're providing good jobs in the United States".

The best way to have peace is through "investment in the world's most successful defensive alliance, and that is NATO". That was the last call, if not a brag of the US' achievement, Blinken chose to make to conclude his last speech at NATO, and it can be interpreted as follows: Investing in NATO is undoubtedly the most lucrative war business of the US.

The real security threat to Europe and other US allies and partners is not the one that US tries to brainwash them to believe, but their surrendering of their strategic autonomy to the US under the shackles and chains of "alliance".