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Nato
Opinion
My Take
Alex Lo

Departing Nato chief doubles down on expansion into Asia

Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance is ‘not just regional but global’, a Western overreach that will be dangerous and destabilising

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Jens Stoltenberg delivers remarks at a press conference during a Nato summit in Washington. Photo: AP
Alex Lo has been an SCMP columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China.

In politics and war, delusion often sounds like vision. Jens Stoltenberg certainly has “that vision thing”, as the late George H.W. Bush once derisively called it.

If the retiring Nato chief is anything to go by, and I hope not, the biggest military alliance in history with “North Atlantic” in its title is about to go global.

Is this Western alliance about to expand into the East? If so, what do you call that? Western imperialism redux?

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In his parting gift for world peace or rather world war, Stoltenberg said in an interview with Foreign Policy, which is itself an undeclared information organ of Washington’s security and foreign policy elites, that North Korea, China and Iran are all in league with Russia, and Nato must be an ally of its Asian counterparts.

Asean nations? I think they pretty much have already said NO, in capital letters. But who’s to say?

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“Our security is global,” Stoltenberg declared. “While Nato is a regional alliance, we need a global approach, and that includes also our approach to China. Because again, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that our security is not regional.

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