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Alex Lo
SCMP Columnist
My Take
by Alex Lo
My Take
by Alex Lo

Asians must just say no to Nato and resolve their own disputes

  • They do not need the Western military alliance, which will be merely a fig leaf for declining US hegemony and turn the region into a powder keg

Let’s cut to the chase. Countries in Asia may want a continuing military presence of the United States as a counterweight to a rising China, but they don’t want a cold, or God forbid, hot war in their backyard.

They may like having the US Seventh Fleet around, but it’s doubtful they would want the kind of nuclear submarines proposed by the Anglo-American Aukus alliance to patrol their waters.

The powerhouses in Europe – Germany and France – prefer to exchange butter than bullets with China, and they certainly don’t want to increase their commitment to Nato when, over many years, they had been dragging their feet to meet military spending benchmarks, until the Ukraine war.

Nobody sensible would want to turn a region that is the economic engine of the 21st century into a powder keg like Europe was in the last century.

At the very least, most Europeans still recognise what the alliance’s initials stand for; they don’t include Pacific or Asia.

While Britain likes to talk big, its leaders must realise in their heart of hearts that the Great Game was over for them almost three quarters of a century ago. That’s not my opinion; I am quoting Simon McDonald, a former top British diplomat in an interview with the New Statesman magazine.

Irrelevant G7 desperate to distract world from its own failures by blaming China

So who wants an Asian Nato? That leaves only the top Nato brass such as Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg who are inevitably American clones and often more gung ho than the average Pentagon general; and of course, the US.

Besides the Ukraine war, Stoltenberg has criticised Beijing over Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

Is the whole world Stoltenberg’s oyster now? Well before his official visit to South Korea and Japan in late January, he was already signalling a mission creep towards Asia-Pacific or, if you prefer the US-Nato lingo, Indo-Pacific.

If you accept Nato expansion in central Europe as one of the causes of the Ukraine war, its presence in Asia would be even more provocative.

Perhaps Nato breeds Asia-obsessives. Stoltenberg’s predecessor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Ivo H. Daalder, a former US ambassador to Nato, have just jointly proposed an “economic Nato”, based on Article 5 of the alliance’s constitution. Know what that means? I am not too sure, either.

Apparently, the basic idea is that a non-Nato and non-democratic country, read China, that might have a dispute with a Nato-affiliated state and take punitive economic action against it would be considered economically hostile against all other member states; hence the reference to Article 5.

This is considered justified because it’s to counter “economic coercion”. But what about US sanctions, which now target almost one in three countries in the world? They are OK, stupid, because it’s not “economic coercion”. Got it?

As the pair put it graphically, “It’s time to tell the bullies that if they poke one of us in the eye, we’ll all poke back.”

Nato office in Japan risks further entangling ties with China: analysts

I am not making this up; it’s really in their text. You can read their memo here, though your time would be better spent walking your dog on a sunny day, and you may use the papers it’s printed on to take care of doggy business.

In the end, though, whether you call it Asian Nato, an expanded Nato or Asian partnerships with Nato, it’s all a cover for the US military, which will do all the heavy lifting. So why bother with Nato? Well, why all that alphabet soup with Aukus, the Quad and what not? It’s to camouflage the declining hegemon’s last hurrah at maintaining its top-dog status in the region, and the vanity of the lesser former colonial powers.

That’s why there is every reason for Asia to resist being turned into another East-West contest. Taking seriously a South China Sea code of conduct between Asean and China would be a good start.

If Asian nations can contain or even resolve their own disputes, there will be fewer excuses for the West to interfere.

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