At the summit on Monday (June 14), the leaders of NATO countries are making a delicate balance of China in order to show firmness, but avoid using rhetoric that would confront such a huge world economic power.
NATO leaders gathered in Brussels are prepared to say that the Western alliance must respond to China’s economic, political and military rise by formulating a new strategy against Beijing. However, they hope to avoid a “new cold war” with Beijing.
“China is getting closer and closer to us. We see them in cyberspace, we see China in Africa, but we also see China investing heavily in our own critical infrastructure,” Stoltenberg Grid told reporters when the leaders arrived at NATO headquarters before the summit.
“We know that China does not agree with our values… We need to respond together as an alliance,” he said, adding that there is no intention to confront China.
His comments were made when NATO was preparing to strengthen its position on China, and received responses from many NATO leaders after arriving.
Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO has modernized its defenses, but it has only recently begun to take any potential threats from China’s ambitions more seriously.
At the annual summit in London in 2019, NATO leaders agreed to focus more on the challenges of China’s “increasing international influence” and military strength.
Biden said that neither Russia nor China “acted the way we wanted,” referring to the efforts of the West since the mid-1990s to bring the two countries into free democracies.
“China is a huge fact in our lives. A new strategic consideration,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, adding that this is an issue that the alliance has to deal with after decades of focusing on Russia.
As EURACTIV reported earlierAccording to a draft, Biden’s top political priority, China, will use much stronger language than ever in the final summit communiqué, and leaders will emphasize that “the divergence between Beijing’s mandatory policies and our values Come bigger” Seen by EURACTIV.
“The divergence between Beijing’s coercive policy and our values is growing,” the draft communiqué might say.
“China will appear in the (NATO) Communiqué in a stronger way than we have ever before,” Sullivan told reporters on Biden’s Air Force One, from the British G7 summit to the Belgian capital.
As a country with a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, the United States clearly has a different view of China from that of European members, who really want to risk the kind of conflict expected by the U.S. Navy.
However, diplomats said that the final communiqué of the NATO summit will eventually avoid calling China an opponent.
On the eve of the meeting, diplomatic sources told EURACTIV that although Washington is pushing for strong language, Europeans are even more reluctant to label Russia as a “threat” and China as a “challenge” to avoid putting Moscow and Beijing in the same basket. in.
However, diplomatic sources say that the 14 former Soviet Union and Balkan members of NATO that are closer to the United States are aligned with Washington in their China policy, because they believe that only the United States can guarantee their security against aggressive Russia.
After arriving at the summit, Latvian President Egils Levitz emphasized that increasing attention to China does not mean that the North Dating distracts attention from threats to Russia.
NATO to stay a regional alliance, but could increasingly look towards Indo-Pacific
After the G7 summit statement over the weekend accused Beijing of violating the human rights of the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang and suppressing Hong Kong, diplomatic language has escalated.
The G7 leaders clearly promoted attempts to counter China’s growing influence in the world, especially in developing countries, and expressed the hope to establish a competitor with Beijing’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road” initiative, providing 100 billion US dollars of alternative plan.
