NATO outposts in Japan was probably going to be with a majority of US soldiers, so the block doesn’t change anything since US has a big presence in the region already. It’s like that friend who never shared the bills tells you he can’t make it to the bar. Yeah Jared you will be missed.
Can you elaborate on the terrible message? I don’t think China prefers US to be in their backyard than NATO. NATO is purely defensive, so unless China had intentions to attack a NATO country it wouldn’t matter. But US has multiple defence agreements with some countries in the region and some of them is on China’s crosshairs. Which makes a confrontation with US higher then with NATO.
The terrible message is precisely that NATO is only defensive in theory, but is willing to expand into the Pacific to defend a territory that is nowhere near its original purview.
The problem with the “purely defensive” argument is that historically, NATO Article 5 has been invoked to declare a war on a country that only indirectly threatened a NATO ally’s regional stability. That’s how NATO ended up bombing Serbia, which was doing despicable things to Albanians, but was not threatening NATO sovereignty to a degree that justifies Article 5.
Add these two together and China’s opposition to a NATO presence in the Pacific makes a whole lot of sense.
NATO outposts in Japan was probably going to be with a majority of US soldiers, so the block doesn’t change anything since US has a big presence in the region already. It’s like that friend who never shared the bills tells you he can’t make it to the bar. Yeah Jared you will be missed.
Except we all know the U.S. is aggressively containing China. NATO getting into the China containment business sends a terrible message.
Can you elaborate on the terrible message? I don’t think China prefers US to be in their backyard than NATO. NATO is purely defensive, so unless China had intentions to attack a NATO country it wouldn’t matter. But US has multiple defence agreements with some countries in the region and some of them is on China’s crosshairs. Which makes a confrontation with US higher then with NATO.
The terrible message is precisely that NATO is only defensive in theory, but is willing to expand into the Pacific to defend a territory that is nowhere near its original purview.
The problem with the “purely defensive” argument is that historically, NATO Article 5 has been invoked to declare a war on a country that only indirectly threatened a NATO ally’s regional stability. That’s how NATO ended up bombing Serbia, which was doing despicable things to Albanians, but was not threatening NATO sovereignty to a degree that justifies Article 5.
Add these two together and China’s opposition to a NATO presence in the Pacific makes a whole lot of sense.