(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)
LONDON, July 12 (Reuters) - As NATO’s 75th anniversary summit kicked off in Washington this week, China’s defence ministry made a surprise announcement.
An unspecified number of elite Chinese paratroopers and other military forces, it said, were flying to Belarus to conduct previously unannounced joint training that would last throughout the NATO gathering.
The exercise, codenamed "Eagle Assault”, will last 11 days until July 19, conducting "anti-terrorist exercises" including night landings, crossing water obstacles and urban operations.
More pointedly still, they will take place in the Belarusian city of Brest, five miles from the border with NATO member Poland - although Chinese officials denied the manoeuvres were aimed at any particular foreign country.
Even without the drills - which appear to be among the largest exercises China has ever conducted on the European continent - China was always set to be on the agenda at the NATO summit.
There was a formal meeting on Thursday morning of alliance leaders with Asia-Pacific "partners" from Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not attend the meeting, instead represented by his deputy.
China is an ever-rising concern to many within NATO and beyond, not least because of what U.S. and other allied officials say is Beijing's increasing support for Russia in Ukraine, delivering a growing number of critical components for Russian weapons systems, if not yet lethal weaponry itself.
"We must not forget that today the PRC (People's Republic of China) is the largest enabler of Russia's war against Ukraine through the provision of dual-use goods," NATO Director of Policy Planning Benedetta Berti told an event at think-tank The Atlantic Council on Monday.
China could not expect to be treated as a responsible member of the international community while doing that, she added.
After the leak of a draft of the NATO summit communiqué that used similar language, Chinese officials responded furiously.
"As we all know, China is not the creator of the crisis in Ukraine," a Chinese foreign affairs ministry spokesman said, describing the draft NATO declaration as "full of Cold War mentality and belligerent rhetoric" and the China-related content as "full of provocations, lives, incitement and smears.”
What approach new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will take to China remains unclear – but his predecessor was pulling few punches at his last international summit.
"If China continues (like this), they cannot have it both ways," outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told another public think-tank session.
"They cannot believe that they can have a kind of normal relationship with NATO allies in North America and Europe, and then continue to fuel the war in Europe that constitutes the biggest security challenge...since the Second World War."
SOME DIVISIONS OVER ASIA STRATEGY Exactly how NATO might engage itself in Asia is a subject of no little disagreement – at last year’s conference in Vilnius, French President Emmanuel Macron vetoed an otherwise widely-backed proposal to open a small alliance office in Japan.
While supporters of that proposal say it is important to keep NATO directly involved in major global security issues including in the Pacific region, others – most particularly France – argue such activity risks being a distraction from NATO’s core task of defending Europe.
Hungary, whose nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Beijing on Monday after an equally controversial trip to Moscow, said this week it was particularly opposed to NATO becoming what it called an "anti-China bloc".
This year, Chinese officials have become much more vocal in their opposition to NATO conducting any Asia-facing work.
"It is necessary to resist the negative impact of the Indo-Pacific strategy and guard against NATO reaching out to the Asia-Pacific," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Thai counterpart Maris Sangiampongsa on Tuesday.
An alliance that began with 12 members in 1949, and now includes 30 European nations plus the United States and Canada, NATO’s founding North Atlantic Treaty declares that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
That promise is explicitly limited to the North Atlantic region, although the alliance has already occasionally operated “out of area” including during conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya.
Speaking in Beijing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lian Jian responded to a question on the NATO summit by saying China's stance on the alliance remained "consistent".
"We firmly oppose NATO acting beyond its characterisation as a regional defence alliance, inserting itself into the Asia-Pacific to incite confrontation and rivalry and disrupting the prosperity and stability in this region," he said.
In reality, few of the discussions in Washington this week revolve around NATO “expanding” to include Asia, certainly not through bringing in potential Asian members such as Japan, South Korea or the Philippines.
All of these countries have their own mutual defence deals with the U.S. already, plus other, ever-deepening multinational relationships, all spurred by mounting worries over China.
Taiwan, recognised by most nations as part of China but functioning as a de facto independent state, has its relations with the U.S. government under the U.S.-Taiwan Relations Act, which has always left “strategically ambiguous” whether Washington would defend the island, though President Joe Biden has more recently said several times emphatically that it would.
But NATO’s European members have plenty of other concerns about Beijing, including intellectual property theft and what they see as Chinese efforts to unfairly swamp their markets with cheap electric cars, batteries and other products.
'NEW LANDSCAPE', SAYS BLINKEN At the end of January, the U.S. military headquarters in Europe at Ramstein Air Base in Germany held a NATO conference explicitly aimed at stopping Chinese efforts to recruit former allied military pilots and other air crew to train Beijing's military as contractors.
U.S. officials warned that some of those efforts included recruitment by front companies that did not declare their links to China’s military.
"Increasingly, partners in Europe see challenges...in Asia as being relevant to them, just as partners in Asia see challenges halfway around the world in Europe is being relevant to them," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Brookings Institution think-tank last week.
Blinken said the U.S. was working to break down barriers between allies in Europe, Asia and worldwide. "That's part of the new landscape, the new geometry that we've put in place."
For all that, however, there will have been no shortage of voices in Washington this week warning NATO’s European members that they cannot afford to get too sidetracked by thinking about Beijing.
Indeed, insiders say one of the purposes of the classified “NATO Secret” session with Asia-Pacific leaders was to convince the Europeans the risk of war in Asia is now very real – and that with the U.S. now increasingly focused on the China threat, Europe must do more to defend itself.
Such views may be voiced most loudly by those competing for places in a future Donald Trump administration, but they are shared by many within the Biden team as well.
At last year’s NATO gathering in Vilnius, the U.S. delegation made it very clear that no further U.S. military forces would be earmarked for Europe beyond those already allocated at the 2022 summit in Madrid.
European nations are also being increasingly pushed to take over more responsibility for arming Ukraine. This week’s Washington summit yielded a deal to release additional U.S.-made Patriot air defence missiles to the government in Kyiv.
Monday’s missile strike on a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital, which killed at least 38 people, will have raised the urgency of that requirement.
But U.S. officials and other experts increasingly worry about declining U.S. stocks of missiles as well as other forms of ammunition. The U.S. makes less than 700 Patriots a year, although new factories including in Germany should increase that over time.
The worst-case scenario, officials in Washington, Brussels and above all Eastern Europe increasingly believe, is that what both sides now call the “no limits” partnership between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping one day prompts Beijing to encourage Moscow to launch a limited land grab against exposed NATO nations such as the Baltic states.
Such a move could leave U.S. forces struggling to simultaneously confront Russia and China on opposite sides of the world – and make it much easier for China to achieve potential military ambitions, including a Taiwan invasion.
Others, however, suggest the Russia-China partnership may already be showing its limits. Last week, the leaders of both nations and eight other countries – including new member Belarus – met in Kazakhstan for a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, sometimes referred to as a Russian and Chinese-dominated counterweight to Western NATO structures.
For all the diplomatic smiles, however, Moscow and Beijing are also effectively competitors for influence across Central Asia and beyond. Russian troops do not appear to have been invited to the China-Belarus drills currently underway.
The world is getting more complicated. NATO appears to have decided it cannot ignore events in the Pacific. China, for its part, is signalling that it also views the European continent as part of an increasingly contested planet. ((https://twitter.com/pete_apps www.pete-apps.com))
