UPDATE: A little over a century ago, rising interimperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up to then, World War I. Today, a ’roided-up version of that scenario is looming, as US-China relations deteriorate and the NATO alliance begins to dip several toes in Asia, nearly six thousand miles away from its headquarters in Brussels.
With the secessionist deputy regional leader on the island of Taiwan Lai Ching-te, who is also a candidate for the next regional leader election, scheming to make a transit visit to the US in August, tensions around the island of Taiwan continue to build.
American military analysts will soon be sent to work at the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) in Canberra as both allies intensify joint efforts to scrutinise the moves of states like China, Russia and North Korea in the region.
NATO’s Expansion Into Asia Is the Mother of Bad Ideas
By Branko Marcetic (edited)
A little over a century ago, rising interimperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up to then, World War I. Today, a ’roided-up version of that scenario is looming, as US-China relations deteriorate and the NATO alliance begins to dip several toes in Asia, nearly six thousand miles away from its headquarters in Brussels.
This isn’t an exaggeration. Asked recently at a joint appearance on Meet the Press whether NATO’s expansion into Asia was “inevitable,” Senators Tammy Duckworth (an Illinois Democrat) and Dan Sullivan (an Alaska Republican) answered yes.
They had good reason to say so. The official communiqué from this year’s NATO summit in Vilnius mentioned China more than a dozen times — a step up from its Madrid Summit declaration last year, which mentioned China only once. Its Brussels Summit communiqué the year before, considered quite hawkish at the time, warned that Beijing’s policies “can present challenges” but called for constructive dialogue and engagement. While the alliance’s 2010 Strategic Concept discussed only Russia, its 2022 iteration mentioned China nine times. A variety of establishment players, from influential lunatic John Bolton and the Brookings Institution to long-serving former US foreign policy officials, are among those who have written favorably about the idea.
But it’s not just words. Three years after the alliance for the first time invited its “Indo-Pacific partners” — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, alongside now–newly minted NATO members Finland and Sweden — to take part in a foreign ministerial meeting to discuss China’s rise, the four countries attended a NATO summit this year for the second time in a row. All four had previously signed their own distinct Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme agreements with NATO, and these invites are meant to further integrate into the alliance even as they remain outside it. Meanwhile, for months member states talked about opening a NATO liaison office in Tokyo, blocked for now thanks to French objections, though certain to land on the agenda again later.
“What happens in the Euro-Atlantic region matters for the Indo-Pacific, and what happens in the Indo-Pacific matters to the Euro-Atlantic,” NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said at Vilnius, an echo of similar comments he’s made before. Stoltenberg has said that “security is no longer regional, security is global,” and finds that “this idea that we can say that China doesn’t matter for NATO is wrong.”
To that end, NATO “seek[s] new relationships with countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia,” he explained, for “as autocratic regimes draw closer to one another, those of us who believe in freedom and democracy must stand together.”
NATO, it seems, will have to have not just a footprint in Asia, but eventually other continents far, far away from the European territory that all of its member states sit on. First conceived as Western Europe’s line of defense should the Soviet military sweep its way across the continent, the alliance’s mission appears to have evolved to fighting for democracy all over the world against the menace of autocracy. (Well, some autocracies, anyway.)
An Age-Old Dilemma
The danger of NATO’s creep into Asia is not that it’s actually going to add any of these countries as members. The NATO charter is explicit that new members can only come from Europe, and that only attacks in Europe and North America (as well as some of its members’ overseas colonies) qualify under its collective defense clause.
But the tragic events in Ukraine show how, even without becoming an official member, a state’s growing closeness — and, more importantly, military interoperability — with the alliance can sour relations and provoke rival, nationalistic governments to do rash and terrible things in a time of rising tensions, as part of a classic security dilemma.
According to Senator Duckworth herself, the nominally non-NATO quasi-alliances in the Asia-Pacific like the Quad that the United States has been building up are part and parcel of the alliance’s move into the region. Explaining why she thought that NATO’s expansion into Asia was “inevitable,” she told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “it already has started to do that with our successful AUKUS agreement between the UK, Australia, and the United States.”
The US government is the most aggressive state in the world, responsible for more than five hundred foreign military interventions since its founding, with more than a third of these taking place after 1999 — long after the Cold War was over, in other words — with just six of its post-9/11 wars alone accounting for 4.5 million deaths. NATO itself has multiple times served as the tip of the spear for US-led wars and regime-change operations, as in Afghanistan and Libya.
An Old Idea for a New Conflict
For many years, the idea of NATO merely expanding further and further into eastern Europe was a subject of controversy. All of a sudden, the alliance is pushing to leap into an entirely different continent, and there’s hardly even a debate. How did we get here?
NATO’s expansion into Asia isn’t a new idea. It was all the way back in June 1990, months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Japan, with eager US assent, for the first time sat down with alliance officials to explore how to expand their security cooperation. Echoing its later opposition to a Tokyo office for NATO, France boycotted the meeting, complaining that it violated the alliance’s charter.
In 2007, retired colonel Joseph Núñez, then serving in civilian capacity in Iraq, called not so much for NATO’s expansion as its multiplication, specifically “a minimum of six” NATO clones for Africa, the Asia-Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, and North and South America each.
“While states may have legitimate concerns about things like sovereignty, the alternative to constructive cooperation is the wildfire of anarchy,” he wrote.
The alliance’s end-of-history aimlessness drove this thinking, all the way up to Stoltenberg’s conception of NATO today as a worldwide arsenal of democracy. Without a compelling reason to exist after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the alliance looked for a new one, starting closer to home with its intervention in Kosovo, before moving into the Middle East and North Africa as part of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
So did the lucrative arms trade. The role of weapons manufacturers in fueling NATO’s original eastward expansion was key, but the alliance’s potential movement into a new continent today stands to be just as profitable for the sector, with Asia and Oceania now the largest region for arms imports, the latter largely due to Australia’s military buildup, and the United States as the region’s largest supplier. Celebrating that US arms sales had shot up by nearly 50 percent in 2022 to $52 billion, a Pentagon official noted that “allies are looking at China and the situations with China in Asia, and thinking they need to increase their capabilities.”
It’s an open question whether NATO’s movement into Asia is even sustainable. Despite the shot in the arm the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given the alliance, member states are still lagging behind meeting their military spending commitments just for the sake of Europe’s defense. That same war, meanwhile, has sparked countless complaints about weapons shortages among allies a year in, with even US officials fearing that battling Russia has so drained its arms stockpiles, it might jeopardize any future attempt to help Taiwan against a Chinese invasion. This should cast serious doubt on the alliance’s ability to somehow operate in two separate continents against two powerful militaries, at least without a massively wasteful and pollutive arms buildup.
There are other costs. A war with China, even by proxy, would be incredibly destructive economically the world over — including for working Americans who, for all the official invective, rely on China as a major and growing trade partner. Militarily, a US-China war would be devastating for both countries, with even a recent war game that tips the United States to win forecasting massive losses on the US side, and warning of a “pyrrhic victory” where it would end up “suffering more in the long run than the ‘defeated’ Chinese.”
The best course of action is acting now to avoid this scenario before it happens — something that involves not just dialogue, but a willingness from Washington and allies to accept some limits to their military footprint. Unfortunately, the Donald Trump–era debate around NATO and US foreign policy, coupled with a McCarthyite turn in political discourse that’s gone into overdrive since the Ukraine invasion, has made criticism of NATO virtually taboo in the United States and Europe. And so, having failed to understand the role of US military expansion in helping lead to one disastrous war, we seem ready to repeat the same blunder all over again elsewhere.
Read more here.
USA endangers peace
By Liu Xuanzun (edited)
With the secessionist deputy regional leader on the island of Taiwan Lai Ching-te, who is also a candidate for the next regional leader election, scheming to make a transit visit to the US in August, tensions around the island of Taiwan continue to build.
The US on Friday announced a military aid package worth $345 million for the island of Taiwan, which is the Biden administration’s first major package drawing on the US’ own stockpiles to help the island counter the Chinese mainland, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
The package would include defense, education and training for the armed forces on the island of Taiwan, as Washington will send man-portable air defense systems, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles to the island, the report said, citing the White House and anonymous US officials.
'Expendable card'
It marked the latest US plan to deliver weapons to the island of Taiwan among many of its attempts to build the island into a “porcupine,” which is supposed to defend itself with its spikes, deterring others and hurting them should they attack.
With this “porcupine plan,” the US further intensified arms sales to the island over the past few years, including Volcano mine-laying systems, HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems, M1A2 main battle tanks, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, SLAM-ER cruise missiles, Patriot surface-to-air missiles, Stinger man-portable missiles and F-16V fighter jets.
In response to the latest military aid, Chen Binhua, a spokesperson at the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said on Saturday that China firmly opposes US providing weapons to China’s Taiwan region.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities’ stubborn insistence on the secessionist position of “Taiwan independence,” attempting to seek “independence” by relying on the US and by using force, begging for US arms sale or military aid, and enhancing military collusion with the US are moves that are making Taiwan a powder keg and ammunition depot and have increased the danger and risk of a conflict in the Taiwan Straits, Chen said.
If the DPP is allowed to go on the path to the end, the youth will only become cannon fodders, Chen said.
The US is seeking every means to instigate contradictions and estrangements between the Chinese mainland and the island of Taiwan, attempting to turn people on the island of Taiwan into cannon fodders and have them to resist reunification by force, at the cost of lives of local people, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times.
US weapons such as mine-laying systems provided to the island are also double-edged swords that could remain threats to civilians on the island decades after deployment, causing serious humanitarian threats, observers said. US’ providing of a large number of weapons, even possibly to civilians, will only raise risks of collateral damage, they said.
It exposed the US scheme to use the island of Taiwan as an expendable card to serve US hegemonic goals in containing and suppressing China, without considering lives of people on the island.
Converting the island of Taiwan into a "porcupine" is a plan that benefits only the US, and selling such amounts of overpriced, yet outdated weapons also gains huge profits for the US’ military-industrial complex, observers said.
Amphibious armored vehicles attached to a brigade of the PLA Navy's Marine Corps make their way to the beach-head during a maritime offense and defense training exercise recently. Photo:China Military.
Wrong signals
The US has been rallying up its allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region and even from other parts of the world to hold joint exercises on China’s doorsteps, often bringing in the Taiwan question as a subject of drills. Analysts pointed out that the US is using its Asian allies and partners as forward deployment bases and at the same time treating them as cannon fodder.
One of the recent exercises was held in the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea near the island of Taiwan in June. Two US Navy carrier strike groups featuring the aircraft carriers USSNimitzand USSRonald Reaganoperated with Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force helicopter carrier JSIzumoand surface units from Canada and France, according to press releases from the US 7th Fleet at the time.
Earlier this year, the US and the Philippines held their largest combat exercises in decades in the Philippines and waters across the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits. The US was granted access to four additional military bases in the Philippines, enhancing its military tactical flexibility in the region.
While the PLA is preparing for a scenario in which US forces militarily interfere on the Taiwan question, it remains questionable if the US is really committed to doing so at the cost of American soldiers’ lives.
The US’ Taiwan Relations Act states that the US will enable the island to maintain sufficient self-defense capabilities, but the US does not have a mutual defense treaty with the island and is not obligated to defend it, CNBC reported.
The US is pushing its allies to the frontline of a potential conflict to face its strategic opponent. With the US being a country from outside of the region, such a conflict is far away from US homeland, but countries within the region tied up to the US chariot would have to face cost themselves, another Chinese mainland military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times.
By provocatively sending warplanes and warships through the Taiwan Straits, the US is encouraging the DPP authorities to confront the Chinese mainland, and showing the US’ strong stance against China, the expert said.
Such provocative transits by a small number of aircraft or vessels are of little military significance compared to the PLA’s growing capabilities, but they send wrong signals to the “Taiwan independence” secessionist forces and other countries in the region, deceiving them and having them confront the PLA, the expert said.
Seeing the truth
Some people on the island of Taiwan have over the years seen through the US' malicious intensions.
A commentary published on a media outlet on the island in May said that the US is selling the fear of war, with the US government, Congress and even normal people seeing the Taiwan Straits as the most possible place for a conflict could break out. And then, US arms dealers came to the island to sell weapons.
The Chinese mainland does not renounce the use of force, and the PLA has demonstrated its capabilities with large-scale military exercises that encircled the island in August last year and April this year following provocative collusion moves between the US house speakers and the DPP authorities.
The exercises showed that the PLA can form a blockade can cut off energy supply routes, reinforcement routes and escape routes of "Taiwan independence" forces, as well as their hopes for US military reinforcement, Zhao Xiaozhuo, a research fellow at China's Academy of Military Sciences, told the Global Times.
The move demonstrated the PLA's firm will and strong capability in thwarting all "Taiwan independence" secessionist moves and external interference attempts and safeguarding national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, Zhao said.
Read more here.
US spies guide Australian military
By Stephen Dziedzic
American military analysts will soon be sent to work at the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) in Canberra as both allies intensify joint efforts to scrutinise the moves of states like China, Russia and North Korea in the region.
The US and Australia announced that they would establish a "Combined Intelligence Centre — Australia" within the DIO by next year, saying the new entity would "enhance long-standing intelligence cooperation".
It comes in the wake of the AUSMIN talks between the two nations on Saturday
Defence Minister Richard Marles said that while the US and Australia already had deep intelligence ties and shared large amounts of information, the announcement represented a "significant step forward" towards "seamless" intelligence ties.
"It does enable us to do joint work and you will then see more joint [intelligence] products coming out of this," he said.
"This is a unit which is going to produce intelligence for both of our defence forces … and I think that's important."
"You'll get an American perspective into the American system seen from Australia. And that is not insignificant."
Mr Marles' declined to say what the joint intelligence centre would work on, and the joint communique issued after AUSMIN says only that it will look at "analysing issues of shared strategic concern in the Indo-Pacific."
But US analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and their Australian counterparts say they are very likely to focus sharply on China's military footprint in the region and its moves to cement security ties with countries across Asia and the Pacific.
The Defence Minister also denied the United States was making the move because it had been unsettled by the security pact signed by China and Solomon Islands last year — a move which blindsided Australian officials and undermined American confidence in Canberra's intelligence capabilities in the Pacific
Mr Marles made the comments after travelling to Townsville with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday, the day after they held joint talks with Foreign Minister Penny Wong and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Brisbane on Saturday.
The two men travelled to Lavarack Barracks to meet some of the thousands of military personnel taking part in the massive Operation Talisman Sabre military exercises.
Both paid tribute to the four Australian aviators who are still missing after crashing into waters off Queensland's coast, and met with soldiers from all the 13 nations who are participating in the war games this year.
Mr Austin said the exercises strengthened the "unbreakable alliance" between Australia and the United States, while Mr Marles declared it would boost "connectedness" between the participating nations and "enhance the security of the Indo-Pacific".
Read more here.