My view on NATO enlargement to Asia. We need it like we need a hole in the head. globaltimes.cn
NATO's world view is simple. The world is divided between two kinds of state. Those that defend something called a "rules-based international order," called democracies, and those who don't know what on earth they're talking about, called authoritarians.
The remedy for this unfortunate condition is More NATO.
NATO has brought war to Europe by encircling a country that suffered 27 million deaths the last time panzers rolled from the West.
Now it proposes to repeat this performance in Asia, against China, with Japan volunteering to be Ukraine.
Now it proposes to repeat this performance in Asia, against China, with Japan volunteering to be Ukraine.
The end of the Cold War brought a golden opportunity to create lasting peace; a security order in Europe that included Russia. Instead we got more NATO. Asia, too, faces the challenge of building lasting peace. It needs NATO-fication like it needs a hole in the head.
This Cold War zombie should have been laid to rest when the Warsaw Pact ended in 1991. The eastward march of the league of the walking dead foreclosed the possibility of building a "common European home" of lasting peace with Russia.
Its other major accomplishments since then have been the destruction of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya through wars of conquest. Its proxy war "to weaken Russia" is destroying Ukraine, impoverishing Europe,
and escalating, without an off-ramp, into an all-out war that threatens all of humanity with nuclear annihilation.
Asia deserves better than this rules-based thuggery. The bloc politics of NATO is, from the perspective of those who recall the tender mercies of its European and Japanese practitioners, the old politics of imperialism in a world it no longer comprehends.
We have seen the Western strategic imagination collapse into unipolar mania. Our home region has been remapped for confrontation.
The old projection, "Asia-Pacific," at least dreamt of shared prosperity across the Pacific. It has been swapped for a theater of war under a US unified combatant command, "the Indo-Pacific." China is canceled. "Asia" disappears. A cartography for aircraft carriers, not Asians.
The clown car of NATO-for-Asia is just the latest sign that the post-Cold War security order of Asia is truly over. In its place is a US-led alliance consolidating itself for global war.
We are in a very dangerous time. Asians must come together to build a common and shared home if we are to have a tomorrow at all. ASEAN has a key role to play in making this happen.
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