Major-Countries Competition and Pivot to the Asia-Pacific: the Strategic Transformation and Influence of “Global NATO”

As a product of the Cold War, NATO did not disintegrate with the end of it, but rather, it has sought to become “global NATO” through continuous expansion and transformation, in order to hold wider sway in international security. In its 75-year history, NATO has made numerous moves including adopting confrontational security thinking, building exclusive alliances, conducting humanitarian intervention and crisis management, expanding eastward and northward and involving in the Asia-Pacific. As a result, it not only failed to achieve its purported goal of extending peace, but made major powers less secure due to its long-term service to US hegemony, which has severely challenged regional and global security order.

The Cold War Mentality Is the Deep Root Behind NATO’s Challenge to Global Security Order

NATO’s strategic security concept has different focuses in different periods, and its evolution can be roughly divided into three stages, namely, defense and containment during the Cold War, humanitarian intervention from the end of the Cold War to the early 2020s, and return to confrontation and containment after its latest document in 2022. Despite of different features, principles and priorities, these strategic security concepts are all confrontational and exclusive.

During the Cold War, NATO by and large adopted a defense and containment strategy in order to win the Cold War. During this period, NATO issued four Strategic Concept papers all together, which strengthened its containment, confrontation and expansion nature. The first paper characterized NATO’s function as deterring aggression. After the outbreak of the Korean War, NATO developed forward defence strategy, aiming to deploy defense forces in eastern Europe away from the Soviet Union. On 13 December 1956, the NATO Military Committee stated that “although NATO’s defence plans are limited to the defence of the Treaty area, it is necessary to take account of the dangers which may arise for NATO because of developments that develop outside that area”. By this time, NATO’s expansionism had emerged. In its third paper in 1957, NATO adopted massive retaliation as a key element of its new strategy. After France’s withdrawal, NATO issued its fourth Strategic Concept, outlining flexible response and escalation as its main strategic doctrine. The document identified three types of NATO response to aggression: direct defence, proactive escalation, and nuclear deterrence. Although the subsequent Harmel Report put forward the concept of containment and mitigation, it did not fundamentally change its confrontational and exclusive nature.

After the end of the Cold War, NATO did not die out with the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, but was given a new lease of life through membership expansion and transformation. Although its ensuing Strategic Concepts emphasized extending security through partnership and cooperation, it still aimed to build an ideologically exclusive alliance. At the signing ceremony for the founding of NATO in April 1949, the then U.S. President Harry Truman defined NATO’s role in international politics in ideological terms, describing it as an alliance of countries with a common heritage of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. These shared values were reaffirmed in the preamble to its first Strategy Concept. NATO’s ideological nature implies that its collective defence provisions target “others” who do not share its values. Thus the “good values” championed in its principles and purposes are neither a depoliticized call for solidarity nor rooted in geographical and cultural proximity, but a deeply political concept of self-identity, which reinforced the idea that other races with different values pose an existential threat to NATO’s security and stability.

Historically, almost all NATO’s intervention and warfare endeavours went in the name of preserving democracy. In 2006, the NATO Summit in Riga emphasized democracy, freedom, peace, and security, and stated that NATO’s missions and operations in three geographic regions, from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur, were aimed at strengthening coordination with non-NATO countries whose interests and values are aligned with NATO. In 2021, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg believed that values the alliance is based upon have been challenged by the rebalancing of global power, calling for unremitted efforts of identity building in order to bolster the common values. NATO’s latest Strategic Concept Paper in 2022 played up the so-called “authoritarian threats”, showing an unprecedented degree of securitization of its values. In the context of the Ukraine crisis, NATO makes up the narrative of democracy versus autocracy and new Cold War. When it comes to NATO’s characterization of China as a systemic challenge nowadays, it is just another reflection of its Cold War confrontational mentality and ideological bias.

Humanitarian Intervention and Crisis Management Have Never Brought Peace to the World

With the end of the Cold War, the US became the world’s sole superpower, and its unipolar hegemony was established. In order to export the Western model and seek absolute safety, the US peddled the concepts of human rights above sovereignty, responsibility to protect, humanitarian intervention, and nation building, among others. On the NATO’s side, its transformation from being a purely military organization to a political military organization based on common values, and its emphasis on crisis management, conflict prevention and national building are all consistent with the idea and practice of the US hegemony. NATO has basically been involved in almost every post-Cold War crisis and conflict. Instead of bringing peace or mange crisis effectively, it either severely challenged the principle of sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter and wreaked far-reaching implications for international peace, or imposed western democracy, rule of law and market economy in conflict or crisis-stricken countries, which usually ended up badly.