Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is anything but a peon – he’s a drudger, maybe a workhorse, who oftentimes can be found travelling the world delivering news of another notably wasteful arms sale or iterating to us all the reasons why this security boondoggle mustn’t disappear. It’s the life of a top level official in the world’s most powerful military alliance. The perks are capacious and global, and one of them is you don’t have to get your shoes – I mean, boots – dirty.
Clean and sleek are the exterior of his shoes, but worn and beaten are those soles. The Spokesperson General has trekked many, many miles this past year convincing all ears willing to listen about the importance of supporting Ukraine and portending of severe consequences if Kiev isn’t supplied with western weaponry.
And one can only admit, even while dragging the US and Russia closer to war, he’s thriving. Soon, the west’s most powerful battle tanks will arrive in Ukraine, and long range missiles will soon follow as talks of sending F-16’s to Kiev start to really percolate inside the Pentagon. No one can predict how any of these escalations will affect the conflict, but it’s the fundraising efforts of the Spokesperson General which have certainly helped Ukraine keep fighting – as a NATO doll.
But assembling large collections of lethal aid for the alliance’s proxy war in Ukraine is a task that any level government official or mid-rate celebrity could accomplish. The harbinger of NATO is assigned another important job – to point in the direction Washington tells him and he cusps his hand holding it toward Moscow. But his other hand concentrates firmly on Beijing.
This makes it no surprise when, on his most recent trek, the Atlantic alliance’s high-spokesperson voyaged to the Pacific rim of the alliances’ earnestly drawn jurisdiction and met with South Korean leadership in Seoul and the Japanese Prime Minister in Tokyo. Having thanked Japan for its support and scolded South Korean leadership for its persistent failure to provide Ukraine with lethal aid, telling them to act more like the vassals Germany or Norway, Stoltenberg spoke positively about the west’s increasingly “closely interconnected” security relationship with its allies in the Pacific.
The threat of China, for most mandarins in western governments, far exceeds the threat of Russia. The Kremlin’s aggression in eastern Europe is an obstacle and, frighteningly in their eyes, containable. Beijing is the government most powerful and motivated, and by their standards, the only one which merits an existential threat.
“The [People’s Republic of China],” says the White House’s new National Security Strategy, “is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”
The North Atlantic alliance, in its Strategic Concept document released after meeting in Madrid last summer, pinpointed China as the only threat to Euro-Atlantic security that could use a “broad range of political, economic and military tools to increase its global footprint and project power, while remaining opaque about its strategy, intentions and military build-up.”
Beijing, according to the new National Security Strategy of Japan, poses “the greatest strategic challenge ever seen.” Changes in rhetoric have been matched with changes in policy, as the government in Tokyo plans to scrap parts of the current constitution by redefining counterstrikes as self-defense, doubling its military spending in the next five years, which already is the third largest in the world, and considering the procurement of Tomahawk missiles.
Japanese leaders should be learning how to live with their Chinese neighbors, not prepping to kill them.
Japan and South Korea, like the Philippines – which will soon harbor four new US military installations, added on top of the existing eight – are respective members of the US-led proxy pact in the early stages of the Cold War.
That the region can resolve issues on its own terms and by its own processes is discarded, despite such sentiments prevailing in ASEAN, since that would do away with the need of a US-led rules-based-order. Having American troops and hardware already in place overseas eases the obstacles of shipping vast amounts of people and supplies into combat zones, simplifying the process of defending US assets and allies in the region. That the decision to fortify these countries with US forces and US arms endangers the very people and population Washington is purporting to protect isn’t considered.
In defiance of common sense and in order to defend a very imperfect rules-based-order, a country literally resurrected in the firestorm of two atomic bombs is governed by leaders who are game for testing the likelihood of a trilogy, and the US-led North Atlantic alliance’s high-spokesperson, whose main duty is to oversee the security of NATO member-states, is trekking around the Pacific in convivial spirits while merchandising global destruction.
The process of maintaining US hegemony in the Asia – Pacific sounds like the sort of operation for the same outfit that conducted the regime change effort in Afghanistan. Or the regime change effort in Libya – or Bosnia. The farther away from the Atlantic Ocean, the more it sounds like a gig for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
