Gathering Against China

He wants to expand NATO’s influence around the globe by “reaching out” to other countries to challenge China and specifically mentions Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. He proposes creation of “a community of like-minded democracies” opposed to the Chinese Communist government. He’s not quite a latter day Senator McCarthy, he of the fanatical anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s, but has joined with such as U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo who declared in August, while on a tour of countries around Russia, that “What’s happening now isn’t Cold War 2.0. The challenge of resisting the Chinese Communist Party threat is in some ways worse.”

On December 4 the BBC noted the assertion of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, that China is “the greatest threat to democracy and freedom” since World War Two, and his use of that time frame is intriguing because, as reported by the China Global Television Network on 4 September 2020, “The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression that lasted from 1931 to 1945 forever changed China and China-Japan relations.”

The stage is being set for further confrontation with China, and Stoltenberg wants NATO to gear up to join the anti-China band whose membership, inevitably, includes Japan.

Western countries ignore the fact that the Second World War had enormously wide and long-lasting effects on China and that for the Chinese people it began when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Full-scale war broke out in 1937 and lasted until the Allied victory in 1945, during which time China suffered an estimated 14-20 million dead. It is not surprising that China remains wary of Japanese intentions, and the alliance of Tokyo with what Stoltenberg calls “a community of like-minded democracies” to confront China, is far from reassuring to Beijing.

The U.S.-sponsored Japanese Constitution of 1947 states flatly that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Although most laudable, this state of affairs could not last, and as noted by the BBC “after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States, fearing Communist expansion in Asia, pushed Tokyo to rearm. To fight off “Red China”, the U.S. established the Japan Self-Defence Forces, [in 1954] a military that to this day has not fired a single shot in anger.” But now it is evident that the U.S.-NATO alliance wants Japan, along with other Asia-Pacific nations, to band together against China and be prepared to fire shots in anger as part of a sort of super-NATO which is eager to use the threat of force as means of settling international disputes.

Once the ludicrous and regrettably pathetic post election pantomime in Washington has played out, the incoming Biden Administration will be able to get down to serious planning for the future, in which policy concerning Russia and China will be the most important international factor. Biden has chosen Antony Blinken as the new secretary of state, and while it is unlikely he’ll be as arrogantly war-drum-beating as his predecessor, Pompeo, who has devoted much time and money to jetting round the world on a total of 47 trips involving countless countries but of course omitting Russia and China, it appears that Blinken may continue a tough line, albeit short of full-frontal confrontation. In July he declared that “we need to rally our allies and partners, instead of alienating them, to deal with some of the challenges that China poses,” but it is possible that he and Biden will seek opportunities for cooperation rather than promoting the Stoltenberg project to create a mammoth anti-China military alliance.

It may be too much to hope that NATO may wither and die if it can’t expand eastwards, but at least the dangerous aspirations of Secretary General Stoltenberg are likely to be discouraged by the Biden administration. In spite of that, however, the Pentagon will probably continue its provocative electronic warfare flights and ludicrous “freedom of navigation” fandangos in the South China Sea, and we can expect gathering against China to continue.