Repurposed NATO isn’t just about Russia any longer: #EfficiencyMatters

‘NATO summit threatens China, at US instigation’, Andre Damon, June 14, 2021 (w/ permission; my bolds)

(US tanks are unloaded in Antwerp, Belgium to take part in the Atlantic Resolve military exercises. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

“Members of the 30-nation NATO alliance concluded their summit Monday with a communique targeting China, declaring that it poses “systemic challenges” to the military alliance.

The wording of the document marked a significant new stage in the efforts of the United States to, in the words of US President Biden, “organize the world to take on China,” as part of a massive escalation of tensions by Washington against Beijing.

The 79-paragraph NATO communiqué mentions China a dozen times, in a marked contrast from previous statements. The current NATO strategy document, first published in 2010, does not reference China, and the 2019 communique mentions the country only once.

“The strength of the statement shows how far relations between the West and Beijing have deteriorated in the 18 months since NATO countries last met,” noted the Financial Times. “Now, just a year and a half later, China has risen to become a systemic rival,” commented Germany’s Der Speigel.

“China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance,” the NATO document states. “We will engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the alliance.”

The communiqué says that China presents “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order,” claiming that China is expanding its military forces and seeking to cooperate with Russia.

Biden’s efforts to recruit Washington’s allies against China is the diplomatic aspect of US efforts to strangle China’s economic development, demonize it in the eyes of the world’s population and prepare for military conflict.

On Wednesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a directive declaring China to be the “number one” focus of the US military. Foreign Policy commented that the review sought “to infuse the Pentagon, and indeed the entire U.S. government, with the overarching goal of bracing for long-term strategic competition with China.”

As Foreign Policy noted: “That’s been a constant refrain for Biden even before he took office, framing China’s rise as the United States’ central challenge of the century. Unless the United States regains its competitive and technological edge, Biden warned, China is ‘going to eat our lunch.’”

Last week, the US Senate passed the so-called “China competitiveness bill,” a massive $250 billion package of corporate subsidies and sanctions that the New York Times termed “the most significant government intervention in industrial policy in decades.”

The NATO summit followed the weekend’s G7 meeting, which, in the words of the FT, “criticised China over human rights, trade and a lack of transparency over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.”

After the NATO summit, Biden was set to fly to Geneva to meet Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ahead of the summit, Biden declared, “What I’ll convey to President Putin is that I’m not looking for conflict with Russia.” Biden described the Russian president as “bright,” “tough” and a “worthy adversary.”

Ahead of the summit, Biden refused to back Ukraine’s admission to NATO,

declaring, in a non-sequitur, “School’s out on that question, it remains to be seen. … They have more to do.”

Despite the US’s insistence on threats against China, the NATO communiqué remained aggressively tilted against Russia, mentioning it 60 times.

While the US’s NATO allies agreed to its demands for more belligerent language against China in its communiqué, there remain significant differences over Washington’s diplomatic offensive against China.

“I don’t think anybody around the table today wants to descend into a new Cold War with China,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel added, “one must not overrate” the threat posed by China, declaring, “we need to find the right balance.”

And NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg insisted Beijing was “not an adversary” but said the alliance needed to “engage with China to defend our security interests.”

As Germany’s Der Spiegel commented: “For some NATO members, whose economy is closely intertwined with that of China, however, this is extremely dangerous—especially for Germany and its export economy. They therefore wanted to prevent overly martial rhetoric against Beijing.”

As Reuters pointed out:

Allies are mindful of their economic links with China. Total German trade with China in 2020 was more than 212 billion euros ($257 billion), according to German government data. Total Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasuries as of March 2021 stood at $1.1 trillion, according to U.S. data, and total U.S. trade with China in 2020 was $559 billion.

But, for all that, Der Spiegel declared: “In China—this much has been clear since Biden’s summit debut—the USA and NATO see the long-term more dangerous opponent.”

Despite their differences and contradictions, the United States and its NATO allies are barreling headlong into a major escalation against China with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Despite a raging pandemic, all of the NATO members are massively expanding their militaries. Earlier this year, the UK announced a 40 percent expansion of its nuclear arsenal, while the Biden administration has requested the largest Pentagon budget in human history.

The massive military buildup currently underway, combined with US threats against China, present an immense danger to all mankind.

With a frankness entirely missing from the US press, Russia’s Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov spoke with China’s Global Times about the consequences of a US war with China.

Denisov was asked by the Global Times: “Competition and confrontation between China and the US are escalating. If one day an armed conflict between China and the US happens, what position would Russia take?"

Denisov replied that there “will be no answer to this,” because “such a conflict would exterminate all mankind, and then there would be no point in taking sides.”


billion dollar NATO in brussels

Surreal NATO agitprop on Twitter:

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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China is about 5000 miles from Western Europe. Why do the Europeans consider China a military threat again? Last I read the Chinese have never invaded Europe. But the Europeans did invade China under the Eight-Nation Alliance. Is new Cold War against China a reconstruction of the colonial Eight Nation Alliance but without Russia this time? Will NATO hold war games on China's border claiming nothing threatening about them?

There is no rational reason for the attacks on China. In fact, for the largest three EU economies, China is their biggest trading partner.

Well, as Western societies implode, I guess they have to make up external threats. Well, I saw this coming in 2016 during presidential debates Hillary constantly harked on both Russia and China as enemies.

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wendy davis's picture

@MrWebster

the Empire needs enemies, and dying empires are always loose cannons, from my reading.

and this is why those nations have to shadow box a bit on their signature bellicosity:

"In fact, for the largest three EU economies, China is their biggest trading partner."

in a similar way, Mutti Merkel has to pull her punches on Nordstream: practicality. thanks for reading and commenting, mr. webster.

hellary who? (j/k. but i hadn't known that, or at last remembered.)

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis the dying Roman Empire in the west in the early 5th century CE, which faced threats from 1) usurpers and 2) armies of various Germanic groups. Decisions were made to combat 1), leaving 2) to occupy the Western empire.

The specific story was that the magister militum, the head of the Army in the West, was an individual named Flavius Stilicho, who fought on oath to protect the emperor Honorius, who was an idiot. Stilicho stripped the border guard in 402 to combat a usurper, and in the winter of 406/407 large populations of Sueves, Goths, Franks, Burgunds, Vandals, Alans, and others crossed the frozen Rhine river, and never looked back. The end result was the present day map of Europe, which was only straightened out through two world wars.

What survived of the Roman Empire was the empire in the East which, through various later political screw-ups, was in about three centuries shrunk to about one-seventh of the size of the Roman Empire that once controlled the Mediterranean. That empire eventually collapsed, through further political screw-ups, and was replaced by a Turkish empire.

American empire looks, through various saber-rattling exercises, to destroy the current civilization, upon which its precious dollar hegemony rests. If sufficiently provoked, the Chinese will doubtless unload their dollars and dollar-denominated assets upon the world market. And won't that be fun?

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

analogous, too. RT reported yesterday that russia is 'squeezing' the Amerikan dollar out of their economy, too.

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earthling1's picture

that looks like a giant claw, Wendy?
So ominous looking.
Maybe that was the effect the architect was shooting for?
It oozes EVIL.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

wendy davis's picture

@earthling1

evil-looking building is NATO in brussells, cost $one billion. now it was supposed to have been labelled as such, at least i'd tried at my home website Café Babylon.

this entire effort was by way of an experiment. the café has been broken for weeks, and i've spent endless hours with wordpress 'Happiness engineers' trying to get it sorted out. two hours yesterday finally ended in the supposition that wordpress sites don't recognize old versions of Firefox, but the engineer inadvertently showed me that it's possible 'copy all content' via this version 89, iirc. the old versions were ones JtC had showed me, and supported Easy Copy to cross-post here.

zo...i worked and worked, and finally found a new way to create a new post, use my media library, and then cross-post it. i still have to log in every time i click in, and go around dobbin's barn to post, but at least for now: Wooot!

inside one of the claws:

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China is absolutely on track to be the biggest economy in the world, knocking off the US from that top ladder rung. But it isn't military. It isn't threatening, unless the entire world is concerned that the US can't keep China's cheap products coming to them.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

wendy davis's picture

@on the cusp

i suppose i should have played dementia joe's 'speech at NATO )o twitter), but he'd been quoted as railing against china's cyber-security threats' or some such, as well.

that the creepy bo-peepy nato agitprop was titled:

'In an age of global competition, Europe and North America must stand strong together in NATO'

...caused me to wonder anew what the world might look like if cooperation ruled, not competition. zero sum rules PAX Amerika!

one's forced to wonder what defense budgets might look like were it not for Nato and western imperialism.

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wendy davis's picture

used to be half again as large, as nick turse at tom dispatch discovered after pouring thru 'related items'. nice job, though. the US allows cot over-runs to estimated costs of military weapons to...aid the military industrial/congressional/news-otainment sectors.

RT has this op-ed up:
Latest NATO summit showed that enabling never-ending US dominance is the REAL reason it exists, Tom Fowd, june 15, 2021 (a few paragraphs):

Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg denied that the West was in a “Cold War” with Beijing, but nonetheless proceeded to say China presented “systemic challenges” due to its rising capabilities, which posed a threat to the security of the alliance. Beijing hit back by claiming NATO was obsessed with the “China threat theory” and stirring up trouble, urging it to view the country’s “development rationally.”

So, is there a Cold War or not? It seems highly confusing for an organization that was itself funded to pursue a Cold War to subsequently deny it has similar intentions towards China. On paper alone, none of it makes sense. NATO is, as its name suggests, a North Atlantic organization, yet it is focusing on a nation which is based on the other side of the world in East Asia. This makes the idea that China is a risk to the alliance highly questionable. China does not have a military presence in the Atlantic, and is not looking to expand into the area. Why, then, is Beijing a threat to NATO?

What is obvious is that NATO is not so much a security organization for European states as it is a vehicle to prop up American hegemony.

i'm out for the night; thank you all. i named my website café babylon as the rastas called the western hegemonster: 'the great satan babylon.

walt richardson (he came to durango, co decades ago. what an inspirational show!):

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PenaTev6Dac]

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wendy davis's picture

‘Painful to watch’: Joe Biden apparently gets lost at G7 summit, wanders into cafe, RT.com, 13 Jun, 2021

Video footage posted online on Friday, but largely ignored by the mainstream media, shows Biden wandering slowly onto a cafe terrace. Someone on the terrace, most likely an ITV journalist, asks “How are your meetings going in Cornwall?” Biden then freezes, flashes a thumbs-up, and replies “Very good.”

they shouldn't have framed this a partisan issue...but so it goes.

https://twitter.com/JewishVoice/status/1403421687861764099?ref_src=twsrc...
on twitter someone had moaned about joe having the nuclear launch codes.

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wendy davis's picture

from telesur english:

NATO Summit: Building Unity against Russia, China, Cyberattacks, june 14 (some bits and bobs):

The alliance members have stated that they are facing “systemic competition from assertive and authoritarian powers” as well as growing security challenges. They specifically focused on Russia and China, among the leading causes of their concerns, with a nod to the nuclear deal with Iran. While also adding that terrorism, threats to the “rules-based” international order, migration, and cybersecurity are also on the list of their top priorities.

“We are increasingly confronted by cyber, hybrid, and other asymmetric threats, including disinformation campaigns, and by the malicious use of ever-more-sophisticated emerging and disruptive technologies,” the joint statement
said.

..............................
Bloc members also rejected a Russian proposal for mutual non-deployment of missiles previously banned under the INF Treaty, abandoned by the U.S. in 2019. The joint statement claimed that the proposal is inconsistent with Moscow’s actions.
The NATO countries further vowed to respond to the growing Russian missile arsenal in a “measured [and] balanced” way while stressing that they have no plans to deploy land-based nuclear weapons in Europe.
...................................
At the same time, the bloc’s members condemned Tehran’s alleged involvement in arming militant groups in the Middle East, including providing missile technologies. They separately called on Iran to cease all missile activities that go against UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

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