NATO's existence detrimental to world peace: China Daily editorial

The United States Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Julianne Smith, has accused Russia and China of employing a set of strategies to weaken the alliance. She said that there is no doubt that Russia and China are trying to split the alliance partners.

She should be reminded of the role NATO has played in the past couple of decades. She should also be told to compare what China has done for world peace and development and what NATO has done to disrupt both.

With the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, there was actually no need for the continued existence of NATO. The role it has continued to play has proved to be detrimental to world peace and development. Had it not been for its military intervention, the bloodshed in Bosnia in the early 1990s would have been avoided. Many innocent civilians were killed in the war in Afghanistan in which NATO got heavily involved.

Had it not been for its expansion in East Europe, there would not have been increasingly fierce confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, and thereafter the military conflict between the two countries currently underway.

At its summit in Madrid in June, it even listed China among its strategic priorities for the first time. In the document adopted at the summit, China was said to pose "systemic challenges" because of its "military ambitions, its confrontational rhetoric toward Taiwan and its increasingly close ties with Russia".

Aside from its participation in UN peacekeeping missions, China has never been involved in any military conflict in the past several decades. China has spared no efforts in developing partnerships with as many countries as possible for economic and trade cooperation, and it has tried in its diplomacy to ease tensions and seek the settlement of differences through talks. It has done nothing to warrant such an antagonistic portrayal by NATO.

NATO is pointing a finger at China simply because of its ambitions to expand to the Asia-Pacific. It needs "an enemy" in the region to justify its presence. The rhetoric about a "potential threat" from China is merely the fabrication of an "enemy" to justify its aggressive moves to maintain the West's global hegemony under the leadership of the United States.

By claiming that China is seeking to undermine the rules-based international order that Western countries engineered, adhere to and believe in, NATO is just stirring up an ideological confrontation between NATO and China, and thus fueling the Cold War mentality in the West.

But what NATO is doing to justify its existence and expansion will only add to the global uncertainty. It has become a leading source of instability and impediment to peace and development.