by MAHIR ALI
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the People’s Republic of China share a year of inception – 1949 – but beyond that have hitherto largely stayed out of each other’s way. Until this month, when China was singled out as a potential strategic threat at the latest Nato summit in Brussels.
Given that Nato was set up essentially as a means of intimidating the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it may have been wise to fold it up and reimagine collective European military mechanisms when the Warsaw Pact – the Soviet-dominated eastern European bloc’s 1955 response to West Germany’s induction into Nato – went out of business 30 years ago.
But the determination to demonstrate the West’s ascendancy as the Cold War victor entailed not only Nato’s survival but its eastwards expansion, notwithstanding Washington’s promises to Moscow that no such thing would occur.
If anything, Nato’s military adventurism has spiralled since the demise of the Soviet Union, albeit with unimpressive or grim consequences, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Libya.
China, though, was ostensibly not on its radar until recently. European nations, by and large, were prepared to make the most of their economic relations with China.
It was the US – the dominant power in Nato and the broader Western alliance – that threw a spanner in the works, with the presidential candidate who claimed in 2016 that China was economically “raping” his country being voted into power.
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