China has become the new raison d’etre for an alliance that should have gone out of business in 1991. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been working for some time to re-orient the alliance towards China and said as much during a Council on Foreign Relations discussion hosted by retired former NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis on March 11. “We must stand up for the international rules-based order, which is being challenged by authoritarian powers, including China,” Stoltenberg declared during his opening remarks. “The rise of China offers opportunities, for instance for our economies, but it also poses challenges for our security and way of life. That is why we should deepen our partnerships with countries like Australia and Japan.”
When Stavridis asked Stoltenberg if NATO would be participating in freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea, he hedged, saying that there are no plans for the alliance to do so but that several NATO members are already doing that. “NATO has always been important, but if you are concerned about the security consequences of the rise of China, and the size of China, then actually NATO is more important than ever,” he said. “Because together we will be able to prevent war, prevent conflict, by just sending a very clear message of unity and the collective defense commitment within the Alliance.”
Even more explicit is an op-ed by Sara Bjerg Moller, an assistant professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, published in the Washington Post on March 12. Moller argues that NATO needs China in order to justify its continued existence. “A longer-term corrective” to the damage of four years of Trump and the mission drift that was occurring even before Trump “may involve reorienting the security organization’s focus toward its traditional role of deterring and defending against strategic competitors: Russia, yes, but even more so China,” Moller writes. “That nation is the obvious successor to the mid-20th-century Soviet Union in harboring global ideological aspirations at odds with those of the major Western democracies.”
While Russia remains “meddlesome,” Moller claims, China is “the bigger menace over the long term” to Western security and values. “At present, China is primarily an economic and political threat, not a military one, but NATO should prepare for the latter possibility, given Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy.
