NATO Calls China Main Challenge in Joe Biden’s Mandate | International

NATO foreign ministers will hold their last meeting on the Trump era on Tuesday and Wednesday. The meeting will serve to confirm that China was not only an obsession of the outgoing US president, but also a major concern of members of the Atlantic Alliance and other Pacific travel companions such as Australia, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand. .

“China is not our adversary (…) but its rise poses major challenges to our security,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at Monday’s press conference before tomorrow’s foreign minister. Stoltenberg believes the scale of the challenge requires that it be jointly addressed by 30 NATO allies and international partners who share similar values.

Stoltenberg stressed: “China is investing heavily in weapons and is getting closer to us, either through the Arctic or Africa or through investments in our infrastructure.” The NATO CEO harshly reiterates the repeated accusations against the largest communist regime in the world: “It does not respect fundamental human rights and tries to intimidate other countries”.

Putting China at the center of NATO’s agenda allows allies to bridge the gap with Democrat Joe Biden’s new administration, knowing that the new US president will keep the Asian giant a top priority of his policy. External.

Similarly, he underlines the European Union, which, during Trump’s mandate, had opted for calculated neutrality in the trade conflict between Beijing and Washington. The EU now offers the US to “work together [respecto a China]”To resolve shared concerns regarding the economy, human rights and security, according to the document on transatlantic relations discussed this Monday by the permanent representatives of the 27 European partners in Brussels.

The text, drawn up by the team of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, will serve as the basis for the EU’s attempt to “renew and strengthen” its relationship with the United States after four years of bitter disagreements with the Trump administration. European sources indicate that Monday’s meeting shares Michel’s intention to “strengthen” the relationship with Washington and the possibility of holding a summit with Biden by the first half of 2021.

Various interests

But the deal with Washington on China will not be as easy for the EU as it is for NATO. Among the 27 partners of the community there are very different interests in relation to the Asian giant. Germany, always inclined to compromise with the Chinese regime, makes an export to the Asian country profitable, whose figures exceed the overall exports of France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Other countries, such as Greece or Portugal, welcomed Chinese investments, particularly during the eurozone crisis when French or German banks cut their funding. And some partners, such as Hungary, have joined the New Silk Road investment project promoted by Xi Jinping, an initiative with which Italy also flirts.

Such interests prevented Europe from engaging in Trump’s disputes with Beijing. Brussels called China in 2019 a “systemic rival”. But beyond the label, which has caused friction with Beijing, the EU has sought an agreement with the government of Xi Jinping and even sought it as a counterweight to the collapse of the multilateral order caused by Trump. China has become one of Europe’s main allies in maintaining the Paris agreement on climate change, the agreement with Iran on denuclearization and even in defending trade liberalization.

The head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, and the outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, tried to bring positions together and launched a joint dialogue forum on China just before the US elections on November 3. But even so, Borrell defended the doctrine he himself baptized as Sinatra, alluding to the famous song My way of the American singer of the last century. “The EU’s response, in its own way, must be its path that avoids alignment with the United States or China,” Borrell theorized before Biden’s victory. A singularity that, paradoxically, will be more difficult to maintain with Biden’s European administration than with a hostile White House under Trump’s orders.