Messed up your proxy war in Ukraine? Well, just blame China. So while the West has been pouring massive military hardware into the conflict to the extent of emptying their own weapons warehouses – and still not winning – it’s Beijing that’s supposed to be the “decisive enabler” of the war. Seriously.
No wonder people say the West is losing its (dis-) information war over Ukraine, because few people outside Western capitals – more especially, their corridors of power and mainstream newsrooms – believe in all that nonsense.
But if the Western allies can’t win over there in eastern Europe, well, just drag it out and turn it into a war of attrition, then expand it to Asia. It’s just Ukrainian lives after all; Kyiv has been dragging men off the streets to be cannon fodder at the front lines.
America may be destroying trade globalisation. But make no mistake, it is globalising the war. That’s what people more conventionally call, starting a world war. A third one. All this lunacy was on full display in Washington last week, at the Nato’s celebration of death and destruction with its 75th anniversary summit. A defensive alliance long past its expiry date, Nato has been turned into an instrument of Western – or rather American – military expansionism.
Given his obvious mental decline, US President Joe Biden may be forgiven for claiming to ABC News’ host George Stephanopoulos that he was indispensable: “You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.”
Nato and other Western leaders can’t claim dementia as an excuse, but they still entertain the delusion that they are running the world. And that’s the real existential danger – to all of us.
Alarmingly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described Nato as playing a “bridge” between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific theatres.
That’s the new mandate Washington has handed to Nato. But why? The US already has more naval power in the Pacific than anywhere else. Well, Nato and a handful of Asian allies will help save appearance and legitimise plain old American neo-imperialism.
That’s why Western pundits and politicians are claiming Vladimir Putin has set his sights on Nato countries like Poland and beyond, while China wants to take over the Indo-Pacific.
When there is no demand for your service, you have to create it; hence Nato’s constant threat inflation and threat creation. But has it crossed Blinken’s mind that most of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, don’t want Nato militarism to infect their parts of the world like the plague?
It certainly has, because Blinken & Co has already prepared a Trojan horse, or rather four of them, for Asia: South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The latter two don’t even properly belong to the Indo-Pacific, but never mind, they have been drafted. It’s an offer from the Big Boss that can’t be refused, even if they are putting their own economies and the lives of their young men on the line.
As Nato’s retiring chief Jens Stoltenberg proudly declared last week, the Western allies will work closely with their four Indo-Pacific partners to “continue to deepen our cooperation in addressing shared challenges”.
Why this renewed aggression? I can think of at least two reasons. One is what may be called Nato’s sunk-cost fallacy in Ukraine. They initially thought they could finish off the Putin regime and the Russian economy. That didn’t work out, and now they are throwing good money after bad. The other reason is that China has always been the ultimate target. But the Western allies thought they had the luxury of doing away with Russia before moving on to China. Now they need to take on both.
But what about the possibility that Moscow and Beijing just want their immediate neighbourhoods cleared of Western encirclement, say, a neutral Ukraine and a South China Sea under some sort of detente? Don’t be so naive, Western critics say.
Well, I say, don’t be naive because the West still thinks it runs the world.