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Lonely China looks to
NATO
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - On the last day of the Communist Party
Congress last week Thursday, China confirmed that it had
approached North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary
General George Robertson in Brussels to open exploratory
talks aimed at starting a "dialogue" with the Western
military alliance.
NATO diplomats said the
alliance was interested in developing contacts with the
Chinese and both sides had agreed to continue talks. The
contact marked a considerable change from the past, and
was especially surprising considering that confirmation
came on the first day of China's new leadership, and
practically on the eve of the expected US attack on
Iraq.
After the disagreeable experience of its
military alliance with the USSR in the 1950s, China has
avoided military alliances for decades. Until a few
years ago it was also very cautious about engaging in
economic cooperation agreements. China was afraid of
being smothered under economic and military agreements
that would limit its independence.
However, in
the past few years, China’s accession to the World Trade
Organization, its growing cooperation with the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and its most
recent push to launch a free trade agreement in East
Asia, have marked the end of the old caution. In the
past couple of years China has also promoted economic
and security cooperation with Russia and four Central
Asian former Soviet republics, known as the Shanghai
Five.
However, the dialogue with NATO is in a
different league, as only three years ago Beijing
bitterly attacked "US-led NATO” for the war in Kosovo
against Yugoslavia. The change of attitude is in fact
slightly overdue, as Beijing has been concerned for
months about the agreement signed in Rome between
presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin on political
and military cooperation between NATO and Moscow. This
agreement with Russia and other former Soviet nations on
China's northern and western borders has the effect of
stretching NATO's reach to the borders of China.
Furthermore, as Italian ex-foreign minister
Gianni De Michelis told his Chinese audience at a
conference in May in Beijing, China has been isolated by
the agreement and could be seen as being cordoned off by
the US and its allies - even more so after the war in
Afghanistan.
Almost all the countries around
China now have some form of political and military
cooperation with the US. China, therefore, has had to
reach out to NATO to avoid this potentially risky
isolation. The issue is so sensitive that it was
possibly broached by President Jiang Zemin during his
summit with Bush in the US last month.
China, in
other words, doesn’t want to be left out in a world
where NATO is becoming a sort of total security blanket
that almost challenges the United Nations. And
similarly, the US is also moving in this direction,
expanding NATO but at the same time grading the real
participation of its members. Next Wednesday’s NATO
summit in Prague will expand the alliance from 19 to 26
countries, adding Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria,
Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania. These countries do not
have the military capability of older members and even
among those old members the US has been making choices.
The UK is top of the list, then comes France, Germany,
Spain and Holland. Italy can provide some niche
services, and the rest can fill gaps here and there.
"It's now Club NATO," said Michael Mandelbaum,
author of the new book The Ideas That Conquered the
World. "And Club NATO's main purpose seems to be to
act as a kind of support group and kaffeeklatsch for the
newly admitted democracies of Eastern and Central
Europe, which suffered under authoritarian rule
throughout the Cold War."
With the agreement
with Russia and now the dialogue with China, NATO is
becoming something else, something more global that
could soon include Japan and South Korea.
There
are two important aspects to this new-look NATO: one,
the benefits of each member state; and two, the role of
the US, which leads the alliance now more than ever.
Each member state benefits, no matter what its position
in the grading system that places the various countries
closer or further from the core - ie, the US. The
advantage of membership is that member states will never
be isolated, and so China would benefit by being in
NATO's orbit.
At the same time, potential exists
for competition among members to be closer to the heart
of the leader. If conflict arises among member states,
as happened in the 1970s between Greece and Turkey, the
US could lean more toward one country than another. The
US interest is thus to avoid by all means similar
conflicts that could taint American arbitrage and that
could eventually make both parties dissatisfied with the
US.
Wherever we want to place China in this new
NATO grading system, China is not a small fry. Its
integration, at whatever level, would imply a major
political effort by both sides that could change the
political profile of China and of NATO. This in turn
would modify the position of Russia with NATO and would
have the effect of including East Asia in the ambit of
operation of the Western alliance.
So major a
change could be the cornerstone of a new security system
which might emerge after the war on Iraq. A new
political map of the world should then be contemplated,
in which the new NATO could have a new role and the
world could have many "clubs" at the same time - the
WTO, the UN, the G7, etc. These clubs would overlap, and
at times the UN may be less important than NATO.
China has apparently acknowledged this new
predicament. The war on Iraq is thus part of a bigger
picture for redrawing the world map. However, this
change is occurring before anybody has had time to think
about it. Something like a new Yalta Conference would be
necessary, only this time the powers would not have
equal weight as they did after World War II, in which
the USSR contributed almost as much to the Allied
victory as did the US.
Almost 60 years after
that conference, the US stands alone while a new world
geography takes shape.
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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