Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With a resurgent Turkey breathing down their neck and an expansionist China trying to find a toehold in Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Continent’s 70-year-old security arm, is likely to brand Beijing as a global security risk.
The NATO leaders, meeting at Brussels on Monday, are expected to brand China a security risk to the Western defense alliance. If they do, the move will come a day after the Group of Seven rich nations issued a statement on human rights in China and Taiwan. Beijing has condemned it as one that slandered its reputation, media reported.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has described the Brussels Summit, which U.S. President Joe Biden will attend for the first time, as a “pivotal moment”.
“We know that China does not share our values … we need to respond together as an alliance,” Stoltenberg said as he arrived for the one-day summit in Brussels.
“China is coming closer to us. We see them in cyber space, we see China in Africa, but we also see China investing heavily in our own critical infrastructure,” he said in a reference to ports and telecoms networks.
The G-7 nations’ meeting at Cornwall, UK, last week scolded China over human rights in its Xinjiang region, called for Hong Kong to keep a high degree of autonomy and demanded a full and thorough investigation of the origins of the coronavirus in China.
Responding to this, China’s embassy in London said it was resolutely opposed to mentions of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which it said distorted the facts and exposed the “sinister intentions of a few countries such as the United States”.
“China’s reputation must not be slandered,” the embassy said on Monday.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that the G-7 leaders had rallied around the need to “counter and compete” with China on challenges ranging from safeguarding democracy to technology.
“China will feature in the (NATO) communique in a more robust way than we’ve ever seen before,” Sullivan said.
Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, NATO has modernised its defences but has only recently begun to look more seriously at any potential threat from Chinese ambitions, according to reports.
From China’s investments in European ports and plans to set up military bases in Africa to joint military exercises with Russia in the Baltic, NATO has concluded that Beijing’s rise deserves a strong response.
NATO is also wary of Russia. “The relationship between NATO and Russia is at a low point, the lowest point since the end of the Cold War,” Stoltenberg was quoted as saying.
“We see the willingness to use military force against neighbours; Ukraine, Georgia. But we also see cyber attacks. We see attempts to meddle in our political democratic processes, to undermine the trust in our institutions and efforts to divide us,” he said.
“We believe that NATO is vital to our ability to maintain American security and I want them to know that NATO is a sacred obligation,” US President Joe Biden said on Sunday at the end of the G7 before flying to Brussels.