Europe

Lonely China looks to NATO

2002-11-19Asia Times

BEIJING - On the last day of the Communist Party Congress last week Thursday, China confirmed that it had approached North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General George Robertson in Brussels to open exploratory talks aimed at starting a "dialogue" with the Western military alliance.

NATO diplomats said the alliance was interested in developing contacts with the Chinese and both sides had agreed to continue talks. The contact marked a considerable change from the past, and was especially surprising considering that confirmation came on the first day of China's new leadership, and practically on the eve of the expected US attack on Iraq.

After the disagreeable experience of its military alliance with the USSR in the 1950s, China has avoided military alliances for decades. Until a few years ago it was also very cautious about engaging in economic cooperation agreements. China was afraid of being smothered under economic and military agreements that would limit its independence.

However, in the past few years, China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, its growing cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and its most recent push to launch a free trade agreement in East Asia, have marked the end of the old caution. In the past couple of years China has also promoted economic and security cooperation with Russia and four Central Asian former Soviet republics, known as the Shanghai Five.

However, the dialogue with NATO is in a different league, as only three years ago Beijing bitterly attacked "US-led NATO” for the war in Kosovo against Yugoslavia. The change of attitude is in fact slightly overdue, as Beijing has been concerned for months about the agreement signed in Rome between presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin on political and military cooperation between NATO and Moscow. This agreement with Russia and other former Soviet nations on China's northern and western borders has the effect of stretching NATO's reach to the borders of China.

Furthermore, as Italian ex-foreign minister Gianni De Michelis told his Chinese audience at a conference in May in Beijing, China has been isolated by the agreement and could be seen as being cordoned off by the US and its allies - even more so after the war in Afghanistan.

Almost all the countries around China now have some form of political and military cooperation with the US. China, therefore, has had to reach out to NATO to avoid this potentially risky isolation. The issue is so sensitive that it was possibly broached by President Jiang Zemin during his summit with Bush in the US last month.

China, in other words, doesn’t want to be left out in a world where NATO is becoming a sort of total security blanket that almost challenges the United Nations. And similarly, the US is also moving in this direction, expanding NATO but at the same time grading the real participation of its members. Next Wednesday’s NATO summit in Prague will expand the alliance from 19 to 26 countries, adding Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania. These countries do not have the military capability of older members and even among those old members the US has been making choices. The UK is top of the list, then comes France, Germany, Spain and Holland. Italy can provide some niche services, and the rest can fill gaps here and there.

"It's now Club NATO," said Michael Mandelbaum, author of the new book The Ideas That Conquered the World. "And Club NATO's main purpose seems to be to act as a kind of support group and kaffeeklatsch for the newly admitted democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, which suffered under authoritarian rule throughout the Cold War."

With the agreement with Russia and now the dialogue with China, NATO is becoming something else, something more global that could soon include Japan and South Korea.

There are two important aspects to this new-look NATO: one, the benefits of each member state; and two, the role of the US, which leads the alliance now more than ever. Each member state benefits, no matter what its position in the grading system that places the various countries closer or further from the core - ie, the US. The advantage of membership is that member states will never be isolated, and so China would benefit by being in NATO's orbit.

At the same time, potential exists for competition among members to be closer to the heart of the leader. If conflict arises among member states, as happened in the 1970s between Greece and Turkey, the US could lean more toward one country than another. The US interest is thus to avoid by all means similar conflicts that could taint American arbitrage and that could eventually make both parties dissatisfied with the US.

Wherever we want to place China in this new NATO grading system, China is not a small fry. Its integration, at whatever level, would imply a major political effort by both sides that could change the political profile of China and of NATO. This in turn would modify the position of Russia with NATO and would have the effect of including East Asia in the ambit of operation of the Western alliance.

So major a change could be the cornerstone of a new security system which might emerge after the war on Iraq. A new political map of the world should then be contemplated, in which the new NATO could have a new role and the world could have many "clubs" at the same time - the WTO, the UN, the G7, etc. These clubs would overlap, and at times the UN may be less important than NATO.

China has apparently acknowledged this new predicament. The war on Iraq is thus part of a bigger picture for redrawing the world map. However, this change is occurring before anybody has had time to think about it. Something like a new Yalta Conference would be necessary, only this time the powers would not have equal weight as they did after World War II, in which the USSR contributed almost as much to the Allied victory as did the US.

Almost 60 years after that conference, the US stands alone while a new world geography takes shape. (2002-11-19 Asia Times)

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