Why NATO is a source of instability in the world

Source: Guangming Daily

When the Ukrainian crisis fell into a diplomatic and military stalemate, the NATO special summit held in Brussels at the end of last month proposed to increase military assistance to Ukraine, increase the military deployment of NATO troops in the Baltic Sea, Eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, and increase the proportion of NATO member states' military expenditure in their respective gross domestic products.

This cold war legacy of NATO, relying on a considerable number of nuclear weapons and a huge conventional military force, has become the only military organization in the world today with global military operation capabilities and plays a pivotal role in the international security system. However, NATO has stuck to a series of misconceptions about security, such as exclusivity, absolutization and continuous generalization, and relied on artificial crises as the basis for the legitimacy of the organization's survival, and has been unable to provide an inclusive security cooperation architecture for the region. The 2021 NATO Brussels Summit falsely claimed that China posed a "systemic challenge" to NATO in the light of the fact that China did not pose a security threat to any NATO member. Practice has proved that NATO is accelerating its descent into a source of regional and global instability.

By over-strengthening the security of the group, by provoking war and creating conflicts, the maintenance of unity and the value of existence within NATO is based on regional scars and the blood and tears of innocent civilians.

In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formally established. Throughout the Cold War, NATO's fundamental goal was to counter the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact and curb soviet "communist expansion." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union collapsed, but the disappearance of the number one nemesis and the drastic changes in the security situation in Europe did not bring NATO to the "end of history.".

In the post-Cold War era, NATO has blindly emphasized that "the security of member states still needs to be guarded by the alliance", and adheres to the concepts of "self-security" and "group security" that are highly exclusive. Not only has this super-military group not played a positive role in world peace, but on the contrary, most of the world's conflicts and tensions are linked to it. The United States and Western countries have based the survival of NATO on violating the sovereignty of the Yugoslav Federation and launching the Kosovo War, abusing counter-terrorism and protecting human rights to provoke wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and have further reduced NATO to an offensive military bloc.

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has successively adopted three "strategic concept" updates. The evolution of NATO's "strategic concept" is theoretically based on the multidimensional aspects of fulfilling missions, expanding functions and absorbing members, etc., to promote NATO's transformation and transformation. However, the practical consequence is that NATO, after losing its global restraining power, has gradually legitimized its intervention in external crises, elevated armed interference in the internal affairs of other countries and pre-emptive strikes to the strategic level, and constantly broken through the bottom line of UN security. In order to maintain the survival of the organization, NATO has interfered in the internal affairs of other countries guided by the security judgment of the group, and the number and intensity of foreign military operations have increased significantly.

A few days ago, the Serbian people held a large-scale demonstration of "We oppose NATO" in the capital Belgrade. Twenty-three years ago, beginning on March 24, 1999, NATO carried out massive airstrikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. According to incomplete statistics from the Serbian government, the airstrikes killed more than 2,500 people, injured more than 12,500 people, and direct economic damage amounted to tens of billions of dollars. After the 9/11 incident, the war and military operations launched by the US-led NATO in the name of "counter-terrorism" continued to break through the Euro-Atlantic defense zone and expand globally in the fires of war. These so-called "wars on terror" have displaced more than 38 million people, causing continued instability and spillover of security threats in the Middle East and other regions.

Blindly pursuing "absolute security", ignoring Russia's reasonable security concerns, repeatedly squeezing Russia's strategic security space, and becoming the main culprit that triggered the Ukraine crisis.

In the 1950s, international relations theorist John Hertz elaborated on the "security dilemma," sparking widespread debate in academia about whether security is "absolute" or "relative" to a country. International relations scholars generally tend to conclude that security can only be relative. Kissinger once pointed out that the absolute security of one country means the absolute insecurity of other countries. The pursuit of absolute security by the world powers will inevitably lead to security dilemmas, which in turn will undermine the security and stability of the entire international system.

After the end of the Cold War, Russia was committed to improving relations with the West for a long time. From russia's accession to NATO's "Partnership for Peace Program" in 1994 to russia's signing of the Basic Document on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between the Russian Federation and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1997, Russia and NATO have basically institutionalized consultations and cooperation. But NATO, as a legacy of the Cold War, has clung to absolute security, never faced Russia's legitimate security demands, and has always placed Russia outside the European security system. In 2020, NATO completed the fifth eastward expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union, absorbing the Republic of North Macedonia as its 30th member, and NATO's territory has gradually expanded from Western, Southern and Central Europe during the initial Cold War period to Eastern and Southeast Europe, extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, forming a complete strategic containment encirclement of Russia.

After the Crimean crisis in 2014, NATO continued to increase its support for Ukraine in defiance of Russia's special historical and religious ties with Ukraine, as well as the long-term presence of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. NATO has recruited Ukraine as a "NATO Capacity Enhancement Partner." In addition to not receiving collective security commitments, Ukraine has enjoyed the same treatment as NATO member states in training, command, logistics and intelligence; NATO countries have established a number of secret military bases on the territory of Ukraine; nato has continuously provided Ukraine with weapons, ammunition and other military technical equipment needed to wage war in the past few years. With its support, neo-Nazi organizations such as the Azov battalion exterminated ethnic Russians in the Eastern Region, creating a series of terrorist and bloody incidents, seriously threatening Russia's national security, and repeatedly touching Russia's "strategic red line."

In April 2021, putin made it clear in his State of the Union address that some countries should not regard Russia's humility as weakness, and if anyone dares to cross Russia's red line and burn or even blow up the "bridge", Russia will take an unequal, rapid and tough response. In fact, Russia has not only given many warnings to NATO's pursuit of absolute security and relevant trends that seriously damage Russia's national security interests and security environment, but also proposed policy attempts to the United States and NATO to hold security negotiations. In December 2021, Russia submitted two drafts of the Russian-US Security Guarantee Treaty and the Agreement on Security Assurance Measures between Russia and NATO Member States, proposing that NATO abandon its eastward expansion and not accept Ukraine to join; Russia and NATO will not deploy short- and medium-range missiles and other legitimate security concerns in areas that can strike each other, but they have been ignored and rejected by the United States and NATO.

This background eventually led to the february 24, when Russia launched a special military operation in the Donbass region, and Russian-Ukrainian soldiers met. The Ukrainian issue has its own complex historical latitude and longitude, but just as Western strategists such as George Kennan, Kissinger and Millsheimer once issued a crisis warning because of NATO's continuous eastward expansion and disregard for Russia's legitimate security concerns, tracing back to the source, it is the United States and the West that continue the Cold War mentality, blindly emphasize their own absolute security, and detonate the Ukrainian crisis.

Increasingly obsessed with the concept of pan-security, it constantly plays a "security threat" to NATO in the fields of science and technology, infrastructure and other fields, so as to seek a new round of strategic transformation and expansion of NATO.

NATO held an emergency summit to discuss the situation in Ukraine and other issues. Although the merits and developments of the Ukrainian crisis are clear, neither caused by China nor controlled by China, NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg said before the meeting that NATO leaders would "spend a considerable amount of time talking about China" at the meeting, and deliberately "touched" China in a joint statement issued after the meeting, "urging" China not to support Russia in any way.

This is not the first time that NATO has attacked China for no reason and played up the so-called "China threat." But whether it is the "NATO 2030" reform report positioning China as a new strategic focus of NATO, or the June 2021 NATO Leaders' Summit communiqué claiming that China poses "systemic challenges", both mark the increasingly obvious pan-security tendency in NATO's new round of strategic transformation. At present, in the absence of security threats from China to its allies, just by virtue of China's leading position in the field of 5G and artificial intelligence, and ranking among the dominant positions in the industrial chain and supply chain in some areas of Europe, it is worried that China will erode NATO's existing military technology advantages and internal cohesion; only because of the continuous deepening of china's economic and trade cooperation with Central and Eastern European countries in various fields under the "Belt and Road" initiative, infrastructure projects such as the port of Piraeus invested by China have been questioned and groundlessly accused of being" will weaken NATO's combat capabilities in areas such as the Mediterranean and the Atlantic."

U.S. Secretary of State Blinken publicly stated at the 2021 NATO Foreign Ministers' Meeting that "there is no doubt that Beijing's coercive actions, particularly in the areas of technology and infrastructure, threaten our collective security and prosperity, undermine the rules of the international system, and undermine values that we and our allies share." The United States is also speeding up the push for other NATO members to agree to revise NATO's "strategic concept" as a general strategic outline to include addressing China's challenges. As a traditional military alliance, the fundamental driving force for NATO's survival is its opponents and threats. At a time when the United States is focusing on great power competition and making global strategic adjustments, NATO, an important tool supported by US hegemony, has continuously created "pan-security traps" to accelerate development in the direction of globalization, and then coordinate to deal with the strategic trend of China's rise.

The concept of security represents a country's fundamental understanding of war and peace. The concept of security is rooted in a country's historical and cultural traditions and actual experience judgments, and is also a centralized determination of the security values and security interests of the countries involved. In the post-Cold War era, with the development of the concept and practice of "global security", no country can cope with the many security challenges facing mankind alone, and the national security interests of any country must be realized in international cooperation rather than confrontation, which has become a broad consensus of the international community.

In the face of the current complex and intractable crisis in Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stated in the process of holding a video summit with French and German leaders and meeting with European Council President Michel and European Commission President von der Leyen on many occasions that China actively advocates a common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security concept, "The root cause of the Ukrainian crisis lies in the long-term accumulation of regional security contradictions in Europe, and the root cause is to take into account the reasonable security concerns of all parties concerned."

In contrast, NATO, which has long pursued the supremacy of group security and pursued absolute security as the goal, has caused serious negative impacts on regional and international security and stability. Whether acknowledged or not, NATO and the United States have effectively become parties to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict through a large amount of military intelligence and various types of assistance from Ukraine, as well as the systematic and all-round severe sanctions imposed on Russia. In the final analysis, the United States and NATO regard their tensions with Russia as the basis for the continuation of NATO's "life", and do not want to see Russia and Ukraine successfully resolve the crisis and conflict through negotiations, which is the key to the current Ukrainian crisis.

(Author: Ugly Zejing, Special Researcher of Beijing Xi Jinping Research Center for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, Associate Professor of Department of International Politics, School of International Relations)