NATO should reject Biden course

This is an editorial from China Daily.

Although former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte will not replace Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary-general until October, the NATO summit in Washington from Tuesday to Thursday will serve to show the organization the route along which Washington expects it to follow under its new leadership.

That US President Joe Biden, in an exclusive interview with ABC aired on Friday, bragged about his being able to hold NATO together and keep the Pacific Basin in a position to checkmate China, as a proof of his diplomatic achievements, indicates the route Washington is charting for NATO with Rutte at the helm.

"I'm the guy that put NATO together, the future. No one thought I could expand it. I'm the guy that shut Putin down. No one thought could happen. I'm the guy that put together a South Pacific initiative with AUKUS. I'm the guy that got 50 nations out — not only in Europe, outside of Europe as well to help Ukraine ... Who's gonna be able to be in a position where I'm able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we're at least checkmating China now?" said Biden.

That Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand are also invited to take part in the NATO gathering in Washington, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed in a conversation at the Brookings Institution last week, confirms the United States is now welding together the US' NATO and "Indo-Pacific" security alliances.

Since its founding in 1949, NATO had not mentioned China at all in its Strategic Concept, its main political document, until two years ago during the Madrid Summit, thanks to the Biden administration's hyping up of the China threat. And almost all of its member states, including the US, the Netherlands and Norway, respectively Rutte's and Stoltenberg's home countries, have stable relations with China featuring sizable economic and trade cooperation.

Yet over the past more than three years, the Biden administration has coaxed and cajoled the US' European allies and Asia-Pacific partners to jump on its anti-China bandwagon without allowing them to care about the costs involved in turning their long-term partner into a rival.

The rise of the far right in European political circles and the forthcoming US presidential election in November will be what most of NATO's European leaders have on their minds as the flag of "shared values" is raised above the Washington meeting.

With the possibility of Donald Trump reentering the White House, the Biden administration's zero-sum game may be transformed again into an America-first art of the deal. So it is likely the attendees will adopt a nod-in-agreement, wait-and-see approach to any bid by Biden trying to squeeze any more vitality juice out of the organization to perk up his election campaigning.

Meanwhile Beijing will be hoping that under the leadership of Rutte, NATO will do more to show the sincerity of the claims made by Stoltenberg, when he met with Wang Yi in September 2022, that NATO does not see China as a rival, values maintaining and strengthening contacts with it, and will stick to its established geographical scope.

With NATO's self-vaunted role of champion of the West and seemingly insatiable desire for eastwards expansion having been the cause of much bloodshed and suffering under Stoltenberg's willingness to be a yes-man to the US, it is to be hoped that Rutte will be able to instill more practical common sense into the organization so that it rejects the course Biden has charted for it.