[A-List] China: NATO offer

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Lonely China looks to NATO
By Francesco Sisci
Asia Times, November 19 2002

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.