The just-concluded NATO Summit in Madrid adopted a new strategic concept document called "guiding development over the next 10 years."
This document is full of words such as "threat" and "challenge", and I am afraid that everyone will not understand it and question the further expansion of NATO in the making:
NATO officially issued invitations to Sweden and Finland, opening the sixth round of eastward expansion;
For the first time, the NATO summit invited Asia-Pacific countries such as Japan and South Korea to participate.
Compared with the "threats" and "challenges" mentioned in the document, NATO's two moves are very targeted.
The document appears to have become a credential for NATO's expansion of its sphere of influence, and with it, there is a legitimate pretext for NATO's actions.
Looking back at history, we can find that such an excuse is not the first time NATO has found it, but has run through the development of NATO after the end of the Cold War.
NATO is constantly making credentials for expansion and making excuses for its survival, in other words, every day of NATO's existence after the Cold War is "borrowed."
When does NATO intend to pay back this account?
NATO's strategic concept paper, updated approximately every decade, guides the political and military activities of NATO, the world's largest military alliance.
Each edition of the strategy concept paper will set out NATO's goals and tasks for about 10 years, to put it bluntly, what to do and how to do it.
Compared with the previous version, there is one main change in the new strategy concept paper:
The definition of Russia changed from "partner" to "the greatest and direct threat."
What is the significance of this change?
In response to the "biggest and immediate threat", NATO will take a number of actions. Specifically:
Increase troops to nato's eastern flank, that is, to the russian side;
Increase nato's rapid reaction force from about 40,000 to more than 300,000.
NATO is expanding its military presence with great fanfare, and the rationale for doing so is to write Russia in black and white as a hostile target.
For NATO, whether there is an enemy or not is a fundamental question of whether it can survive. This has been the case for more than three decades.
On 1 July 1991, the Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved. NATO, which made the warsaw pact its mission, suddenly lost its meaning of existence, and it should have disappeared into history like the Warsaw Pact.
But the U.S. government at the time didn't think so.
Long before the official dissolution of warsaw, the U.S. government began to mull a way out for NATO, and when the upheavals in Eastern Europe began in 1989, he began to lay the groundwork, calling for NATO to be reorganized, rather than abolishing or replacing it with a new security structure.
The U.S. government once made a secret report in which it said that a united and stable Europe would become the greatest threat to the United States.
From this report, it is not difficult to understand why the United States wants to retain NATO, which can become a tool for the United States to manipulate and balance Europe.
Therefore, after NATO no longer had the need to exist, the main designer of its strategy, the United States, began to look far ahead and "beg" for NATO's reasons for survival.
As a military alliance organization, NATO can only survive in an environment of confrontation and conflict. However, looking at the world at that time, countries that had experienced hot wars and cold wars were extremely eager for peace and development. Then you can only make it yourself.
That is to say, if NATO wants to obtain the capital for survival, it is bound to sacrifice the peace and stability of a certain country or region, and NATO begins to live for itself.
This also means that what NATO owes is a blood debt.
As for the evidence for the continuation of life, it is the so-called "strategic concept paper".
On November 8, 1991, the NATO Summit in Rome published the first strategic concept paper after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which stated:
NATO faces incalculable and unpredictable threats caused by economic crises, ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes.
Where should we ask for capital for conflict and confrontation? NATO at the time was also unable to immediately target specific targets.
Therefore, in this document, NATO can only generalize the threat, and use this generalized threat as an excuse to give NATO a breath first.
Such a vague concept naturally cannot endorse NATO. The U.S. government urgently needs to find new excuses to justify NATO's name in order to maintain its hegemony and try to create a unipolar world. Soon, a scholar's theory caught the attention of the United States. In 1993, the American political scientist Huntington proposed the "clash of civilizations theory". The United States sees room for borrowing:
Use this theory to divide the camp of civilization and lay the groundwork for conflict.
According to this theory, the world can be divided into eight major civilizations - Chinese civilization, Japanese civilization, Indian civilization, Islamic civilization, Western civilization, Latin American civilization, African civilization, and Russian Orthodox civilization.
In Huntington's view, globalization is making civilizations generally awaken, which also weakens the strength of Western civilization.
In the eyes of scholars, the interactive process of the development of civilizations with different cultures, races and religions is a hotbed of conflict in the eyes of the US government.
The emergence of Huntington's theory provides a reason for the United States to maintain hegemony - NATO wants to defend and defend Western civilization. In other words, civilizations other than Western civilization are potential threats to Western civilization, and the narrative of establishing enemies is being laid out step by step.
For this reason, in theory, any country that belongs to the West historically, religiously and culturally can join NATO if they wish, and together prevent the decline of Western civilization.
In 1997, former US Presidential National Security Adviser Brzezinski's "Eurasian Integration Strategy" clearly defined the direction for NATO's next enemy:
The United States should strengthen and expand its democratic position in Eurasia, and to this end, the United States should regard NATO, which is entrenched on the European continent, as a "bridgehead" and set its sights on the east.
It didn't take long for NATO to find its first "enemy."
In 1999, conflicts broke out within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The US-led NATO launched air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without the authorization of the United Nations on the pretext of "preventing the emergence of a humanitarian crisis."
Then-US President Bill Clinton gave a televised address to the bombing. From his speech, we can see that this bombing operation is a practice of NATO's enemies.
Clinton mentions:
The region, although small, is located between the tit-for-tat cultures of Europe, Asia and the Middle East – the clash of civilizations theory;
The internal conflict of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will cause refugee flows, and the countries around the region will be struggling because of the refugee flows, and we must "help" such a democracy , the Eurasian integration strategy.
The Americans open their mouths and shut their mouths is "humanitarianism", but in fact, the United States and NATO have created a humanitarian disaster and completely broken the peace in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the surrounding areas.
The area of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is only more than 100,000 square kilometers, and the population is only more than 12 million people. But the U.S. bombing lasted 78 days.
According to incomplete statistics, NATO has dispatched more than 1,150 aircraft, launched 1,000 cruise missiles, and dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs. Among them, there are also 31,000 shells of depleted uranium, which are carcinogens and chemically and radiotoxic, which are banned by international law.
The bombardment killed more than 2,000 innocent civilians, injured more than 6,000, displaced nearly 1 million, and lost more than 2 million people to their livelihoods.
The Chinese Embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was also bombed by NATO, causing the death of three Chinese journalists and the injury of many others, which is a blood debt owed by NATO to the Chinese.
Regarding the bombing, Robert Hunter, then U.S. ambassador to NATO, said something like this:
If NATO does not allow the FRY to comply this time, then the meeting marking the 50th anniversary of NATO's founding in April this year will not become a "grand gathering to discuss its new strategic concepts or grand ideas."
The "grand event" robert hunt said was the NATO Washington Summit in 1999. In the nearly ten years planned in the last strategic document, NATO has continuously paved the way for enemies, and finally set its sights on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, using one life after another to renew its own life.
At the summit in Washington, NATO put forward a second strategy document, which provided another basis for NATO's continued life.
In the practice of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it has become the "talking point" of NATO, which has made it clear that the NATO alliance still faces an unpredictable crisis - the uncertainty and instability of NATO's neighboring countries will quickly trigger a regional crisis.
NATO has set its sights on the countries surrounding the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and wants to extend the front of camp confrontation through expansion and continue to accumulate capital for itself.
NATO declared that it would open its doors to all European powers, especially the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
With the targets clear, NATO began its expansion without stopping:
In 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO.
In 2004, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia joined NATO;
In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined NATO.
From 1999 to 2009, in just over 10 years, the number of NATO members has changed from 16 to 28, and this expansion trend is also in line with the previous theory of the clash of civilizations - pushing NATO's borders closer to the borders of different civilizations. As a result, the greater the likelihood of conflict, which is the potential capital for NATO's development.
In addition, the outbreak of the Kosovo War in 1999 also gave NATO new inspiration, and the strategic concept proposed at the Washington summit emphasized the function of dealing with regional crises.
As a result, NATO was involved in successive wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The turmoil and devastation in these places have bought NATO's growing capital, and NATO has become more proactive and aggressive.
The outcome of the war in Afghanistan is known to everyone – the war has been fought for 20 years.
In those 20 years, more than 30,000 Afghan civilians have died, more than 60,000 civilians have been injured, and some 11 million have become refugees.
Successive humanitarian disasters have been brought to the world, and successive wars have been mired in wars, especially in europe's extraterritorial regions, which has made some NATO member countries also begin to reflect.
This has led to the rise of the debate about why NATO exists, and NATO, which urgently needs to identify another enemy.
At the Lisbon Summit in 2010, NATO presented a third strategic concept paper, which shows from this evidence of continued life that NATO at that time did not clearly target new hostile targets.
In the document, NATO only refers to the following in general terms:
The international community has seen many "new challenges" such as cyber attacks, energy security, missile attacks, and environmental security. In order to meet these challenges, NATO must preemptively attack, which requires NATO to operate globally to increase NATO's offensiveness.
It's basically a cliché.
After the financial crisis, countries have become more aware of the significance of cooperation and development, which is not good news for the United States, which wants NATO to survive. The United States must take the initiative to do something.
In 2012, at the urging of the United States, NATO announced the launch of the construction of the European Missile Defense System as part of the U.S. Global Anti-Missile System. This plan was strongly opposed by Russia:
The anti-missile system sounds like a defensive system, but it plays an "offensive" role - in order to maintain a strategic balance, Russia can only increase the number of its offensive strategic weapons.
The United States, pinning on Europe's security and stability, is looking for a sustainable capital for NATO.
Russia has repeatedly asked the United States and NATO to make clear and legally binding commitments to ensure that its anti-missile systems deployed in Europe will not target Russia. But the United States and NATO have been slow to respond positively to the problem.
In response, Russia chose to deploy new missiles as a warning.
Russia's move has become a fresh material for NATO to render the "Russian threat". But that's not enough.
Soon after, NATO suspended its transactional cooperation with Russia, but expanded its military cooperation with Ukraine – which undoubtedly stirred Russia's nerves.
Since then, NATO has frequently sent "invitation" signals to Ukraine.
Moreover, NATO has also completed the fourth and fifth rounds of eastward expansion:
In 2017, Montenegro joined NATO;
In 2020, North Macedonia joined NATO.
So far, NATO has expanded to 30 member states.
This year, under the continuous fueling of NATO countries led by the United States, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has escalated.
When the war ignited, NATO continued to develop capital.
At the summit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also generously admitted that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia for the past eight years.
It is clear that the United States and NATO have long been secretly targeting Russia, step by step.
NATO, once again, has made enemies.
The escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has produced a huge spillover effect:
Sanctions on Russian energy lead to higher global energy prices;
European capital outflows hit investment and consumer confidence;
Rising food prices have exacerbated inflation.
Many NATO countries have suffered from these problems.
NATO itself knows that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will not be enough to support NATO's "residual breathing" for the next 10 years. So NATO began to look for new targets.
Asia is one of the directions to aim. NATO is constantly extending its hand to Asia to promote the "Asia-Pacificization of NATO."
In fact, the idea of the so-called "Asian version of NATO" was proposed by Professor Narapat, head of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University in India.
In the scenario, the United States and India are the core of the "Asian version of NATO", Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and South Korea are the sub-core, and The Arab countries such as Kuwait and Qatar are the third level.
The purpose of this is to "isolate" China, Pakistan and other countries.
In early 2002, then-US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld formally proposed the concept during a visit to Australia, and since then, the US government has consulted with Australia and Japan on several occasions.
In 2006, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed that Japan form a four-country strategic alliance with the United States, Australia, and India.
Since 2010, the United States has held frequent military exercises in the Pacific Rim, Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.
The source of the Biden administration's efforts to promote the "Asia-Pacificization of NATO" comes from here.
Tan has previously summed up the Biden administration's "small circle" routine of strengthening ties between different alliance systems and projecting the power of the Atlantic Alliance into the Asia-Pacific region.
In the new strategic concept paper presented at this year's summit, in addition to listing Russia as the "biggest and direct threat", it also refers to China as NATO's "systemic challenge" - NATO, and wants to pave the way for another enemy.
But the United States wants to replicate NATO in Asia, which is undoubtedly delusional – Asia is not Europe, whether China is a threat, and every country knows it.
China has always been a defender of regional peace and world peace, and China has the ability to cut off the black hand of extraterritorial forces that want to disturb regional tranquility.
NATO wants to make a fuss in Asia by means of "regional security" and wants to continue its life for itself by means of exaggerating the threat of China.
The world is completely different from the world that just ended the Cold War, the power of developing countries and emerging market countries is constantly evolving, and multilateralism and a more sustainable development and security concept have become the mainstream. NATO should be even more aware that relying on enemies to continue its life may be able to survive for a while, but it is doomed to not be able to rely on a lifetime, and the era of being willing to rely on its own strength and hegemony as an "old lai" has passed.
What's more, the three pillars of the rapid rise of the United States after the Cold War, which supported the "old lai"—the ability of the U.S. economy to show astonishing achievements, the ability of the United States' powerful military power to dominate any land, sea, and airspace in the world, and the values that the United States continues to sell to the outside world are all wavering to varying degrees.
Only thinking about continuing life, not wanting to look up at the world, waiting for NATO's fate, there is only one, that is, demise.
NATO should think ahead about how to pay off the blood debt it owes – I'm afraid, it can't be solved by disbanding the organization.