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China’s growing military and economic presence in the Atlantic region is expected to trigger a rare warning from NATO leaders about the potential security threat when they meet on Monday, diplomats said.
From joint Chinese exercises with Russia to Western concerns that China wants to establish military bases in Africa, NATO’s focus reflects China’s primacy among Western foreign policy concerns, particularly those of the U.S. president. , Joe Biden.
“It’s not about NATO going to China,” said Claudia Major, a defense analyst at the German Institute for International Affairs and Security. “It’s about ‘China coming to Europe and we need to do something about it.'”
In 2015, joint military exercises with Russia brought the Chinese navy to the Mediterranean and the heart of Europe for the first time. Since then, China has accumulated the the largest naval fleet in the world and invested in critical European infrastructure, including ports and telecommunications networks.
“China [through its navy] has reached across the Indian Ocean, the Gulf, to the Red Sea and has been in the Mediterranean, “according to a British military official, who said China had not yet deployed submarines in the North Atlantic, but that could do it in the future.
“You build nuclear submarines for range and stealth. And China likes to test the limits. ”
The joint statement provided by the transatlantic security alliance, which diplomats said was still under discussion and subject to change, would be the second time NATO leaders would frontally address the issue of China. The first was in December 2019, at the insistence of the Donald Trump administration.
But it is understood that Biden is pushing harder language that the innocuous terminology “opportunities and challenges” used at the time.
However, how to deal with the issue poses a dilemma for the 30-member group, which was originally created in 1949 to deal with threats from the Cold War era.
Internally, NATO countries are divided on how to deal with China: a member of Hungary, for example, has good political relations with Beijing.
In addition, there is reluctance to confront Beijing in its own Pacific region, although the United Kingdom and France have continued to deploy ships to carry out freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea.
Some NATO members consider China’s joint military operations with Russia to be a particularly unpleasant development. In addition to their annual military exercises, Beijing and Moscow have recently added joint missile defense exercises and training for internal security forces.
“Theirs [the Chinese/Russian] the relationship is transactional and pragmatic rather than ideological, “the UK military official said.” But working together in any form provides trust. And trust is something we should distrust. “
As the Center for New American Security, an American bipartisan think tank, warned in a document January report: “When Russian and Chinese interests align, Moscow and Beijing could end up coordinating their combined capabilities to challenge U.S. foreign policy.”
Another NATO anxiety is Africa, which China could use to expand its military presence in the Atlantic as part of its long-term goal of becoming a truly global armed force.
Gen Stephen Townsend, head of the US African Command, he told the U.S. Senate in April that his “global concern for global power competition” was what he described as Chinese efforts to establish a militarily useful naval facility on the west coast of Africa. “I’m talking about a port where they can rearm with ammunition and repair naval ships,” he said.
Chinese military experts said there was still no evidence that Beijing was trying to establish such a West African base. However, China does a base in Djibouti and has already used international anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden to train thousands of military personnel and to establish military relations with countries outside its usual neighborhood.
Every time a naval contingent has just deployed, for example, it usually makes a detour on its way home. Some have visited the Mediterranean and the east and west coasts of Africa.
Another trend that is bothering NATO allies is the growing involvement of Chinese companies in critical infrastructure in Europe, such as Huawei telecommunications company.
The Chinese state shipping company Cosco also owns a controlling stake in Piraeus, Greece’s largest port, and reportedly in talks to invest in a Hamburg port terminal.
These economic ties complicate NATO’s efforts to create a unified approach to China, as well as political relations between Beijing and friendly European leaders.
This creates the potential for clashes, with the tougher stance of Washington and Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary general, than last month. warned that China “came to us” in areas such as cyberspace, Africa and the Arctic.
“There is a risk that maintaining this discussion in NATO will lead to very uncomfortable differences between allies in terms of the actual amount of China being perceived as a threat,” said Sarah Raine, an expert on geopolitics and strategy at the International Institute for Development. ‘Strategic Studies.
“The fact is that there are countries that hawks consider making arguments in favor of China in NATO, at least in terms of their robustness but not confrontation.”
Additional reports from Katrina Manson in Washington
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