By Duan Ting

Leaders of NATO members approved the new Strategic Concept 2022 at the summit held in Madrid, Spain at the end of June. The new document evaluated the security environment faced by NATO and specified its core tasks in the next ten years.

Yet as the blueprint guiding NATO’s future development, the new Strategic Concept is fraught with confrontation, zero-sum mindset, and ideological prejudices.

The new Strategic Concept exaggerates security threats and agitates bloc confrontation

NATO’s new Strategic Concept views “major-country competition” as the most severe security challenge in the next decade, and views Russian Federation as the most significant and direct threat. It also makes groundless attacks against China, labeling it as posing systemic challenges to NATO’s interests, security, and values. It regards the China-Russia strategic partnership of coordination as a threat too.

There is no doubt that the document’s highlight of “major-country competition” is based on America’s strategic intention and aimed to help the US oppress its rivals and maintain its hegemony. However, the differentiation between “threat” and “challenge” made by the document reveals the differences between the US and Europe regarding security concerns and geostrategic considerations. It also indicates that NATO’s European members don’t see completely eye to eye with the US on the China issue.

The new Strategic Concept emphasizes collective defense and shows an aggressive tendency.

The new Strategic Concept reiterates that ensuring the collective defense and security of all Allies is NATO’s core task and goal. It lists deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security as NATO’s three core tasks for the next decade. This reflects how it will use its military capacities in the next ten years, and also the offensive and defensive sides of its strategy.

First of all, NATO believes that in an environment of strategic competition, it must enhance its global influence and conduct deterrence, defense, competition and denial in all domains and directions. In other words, it will fulfill the task in a more proactive way, which demonstrates NATO’s outward, aggressive strategic thinking.

Second, NATO vows to further enhance the war-preparedness, responsiveness and maneuverability of its troops, reinforce pre-deployment of troops and equipment, upgrade military infrastructure, and make speedy reinforcement more reliable. This means NATO will be more flexible and proactive with military means when responding to or dealing with crises in the future.

The new Strategic Concept serves American hegemony and undermines world peace.

NATO was the outcome of the Cold War. It should have been dissolved with the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, it has experienced five rounds of eastward expansion under America’s lead since then, and has fanned flames, made trouble, and constantly threatened to use force around the world. It is the organization itself that has brought the greatest harm to world security.

Under the leadership of the US, NATO’s new Strategic Concept is rife with examples of calling black white – it describes the intentional containment of China as self-preservation, and it accuses China of trying to split NATO while it is NATO that initiates confrontation. The document in no way reflects NATO’s self-claimed defensive nature, but exposes its true color of drawing ideological lines, instigating conflict and confrontation, and undermining world peace. The Strategic Concept follows America’s strategic intention and serves to help maintain America's hegemony in the next ten years.

In the new Strategic Concept, the US makes the top-level design for NATO to put its fingers in the Asian Pacific pie and forces its allies onto the America-laid track of suppressing China. Washington spares no effort in instigating the EU-Russia confrontation in hopes of continuously weakening Moscow, getting Europe to step up its defense, and consequently lessening its own defense burden on the continent. The document reveals America’s well-calculated plan to kill three birds with one stone – containing China, weakening Russia, and harming Europe. Such a sinister motive is ingrained in America’s strategic tradition. It always views the Eurasian continent as a geopolitical “chess piece”, and believes that it can only maintain its hegemony by wrecking and blocking any possible cooperation among China, Russia, and the EU.

It’s easy to imagine if the international situation evolves as what America has planned, Asia Pacific and Eurasia will know no end of chaos and conflict. At that time, the only one to benefit is Uncle Sam.

(The author is from the National Security College, China PLA National Defence University)