Washington has NATO in its pocket: China Daily editorial

The hyping up of the meteorological research balloon that inadvertently entered United States' airspace as a security threat shows no signs of abating. Vocal anti-China hawk NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg has thrown his hat into the ring. With his trademark hyperbole, he claimed that China was carrying out a surveillance flight program that represents a threat to not just national security but global security.

In a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday, he warned of "the constant risk of Chinese intelligence" and said countries must step up what they do to protect themselves.

Giving lie to his and Washington's scaremongering, he also revealed the purpose of it. Claiming that "the balloon over North America" — notably just balloon, not surveillance or spy balloon — confirms the challenges that "China poses to our security, to our values and, and to our interests", he said that it "very much highlighted the importance of strengthening the cooperation between NATO and our partners in the 'Indo-Pacific'".

By playing up the balloon incident and praising the US for shooting it down — which he called "a prudent, responsible and vigilant" response — Stoltenberg made clear to the world, if it wasn't clear already, that the US has NATO firmly in its pocket.

Before pointing fingers at others as threats, the NATO chief should look at what NATO has done to stoke the conflict in Europe.

The Ukraine crisis, now poised to drag on into its second year, has been the result of NATO's relentless pressure on Russia. As a relic of the Cold War, NATO should have been disbanded long ago. Yet instead, it let itself become the spearhead for the US in its efforts to constrain Russia.

Having pushed up to Russia's doorstep, NATO has poured oil on the flames at the expense of Europe's peace and stability by supplying Ukraine with military assistance and increasingly more advanced and longer-range weaponry.

As Stoltenberg's remarks made clear, NATO has also eagerly jumped on the US bandwagon to contain China. Last year, the military alliance adopted a new strategic concept which laid bare intentions of the US, its de facto leader, to instigate bloc confrontation by demonizing China and Russia and seeking to link them together in the popular imagination.

It is a typical practice of its double standard for the military alliance to ask its members to hike military expenditure, beef up military muscle and expand its traditional line of defense on the one hand and accuse others whom it deems to be strategic rivals of being a threat.

It is NATO's willingness to be a puppet of the US that is the real threat to global security, as the US' motivations are not deterrence and defense, but suppression and subservience.