My Take | Is the Nato chief a Beijing stooge?
- Jens Stoltenberg may sound like an anti-China hawk but he seems to have no idea what Beijing wants from the wars in Ukraine and Palestine
I used to think retiring Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was just another American stooge. Now I no longer do. Or if he is, he is not exactly serving his Washington masters well. Beijing probably would want him to stay on longer.
But perhaps there is still hope, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, someone who sounds as hawkish but just as strategically clueless as Stoltenberg, has been floated as his possible successor.
“What matters is that Ukraine gets continued support, because we need to realise that this is closely watched in Beijing,” Stoltenberg said on Fox News the other night.
So he is still claiming, while many more intelligent Western analysts no longer do, that the outcome in Ukraine will determine how mainland China will decide to retake the island of Taiwan as its own.
What Stoltenberg doesn’t seem to realise is that Beijing wants what he wants; that is, the Western powers, led by the United States, to get tied down in Ukraine as an unending military commitment, year after year.