Biden puts NATO focus on China

Joe Biden’s decision to push next Monday’s NATO summit in Brussels to reorient the West’s premier military alliance towards tackling “an increasingly aggressive China” deserves strong support. According to US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking ahead of the gathering of leaders of the 30 NATO nations, Mr Biden believes that as China is rapidly increasing its global quest for influence and control over supply routes and raw materials, the alliance must play a bigger role in meeting the challenges looming in the Pacific and elsewhere.

NATO’s founding post-war mandate 72 years ago was as a North Atlantic alliance with a focus firmly on what is now Russia. But the world has changed dramatically and there is not a NATO nation that does not face consequences from Beijing’s muscular militarism and expansionism. China may not yet pose a direct military threat to Europe and the North Atlantic, as a high-level international report on NATO’s future concluded in December. But the fact one-third of the world’s maritime trade passes through the South China Sea underlines the vital importance to NATO nations of being directly involved in helping push back against Chinese threats to freedom of navigation through the South China Sea and Beijing’s bullying of small nations.

So do recent Chinese strategic moves such as the establishment of the People’s Liberation Army’s first overseas military base, with thousands of troops, in highly strategic Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Djibouti is situated next to Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait that links the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea, Suez Canal and Gulf of Aden, all vital to global trading routes and European supply chains.

Following the weekend G7 summit in Cornwall, attended by Scott Morrison, Monday’s NATO summit provides the US President with an opportunity to achieve a vital refocusing of NATO’s priorities and the considerable resources it controls. Beijing’s unrelenting belligerence and refusal to play its part in a rules-based world order demand no less. So does Mr Biden’s wish to build a powerful alliance of the world’s democratic nations. NATO was one of several Western groupings put under strain by Donald Trump’s ambivalence towards traditional alliances. But the central role it played for 20 years in co-ordinating coalition forces in Afghanistan, including Australia’s, showed its effectiveness in helping confront a major strategic challenge far from home in Europe.

The challenge to NATO, as its secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, says, is to embrace a “global outlook” again and join with democracies across the globe to counter the rising challenge from China.