Commentary: NATO's new strategic concept exposes Washington's hegemony pursuit

MADRID, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Featuring anti-China rhetoric, NATO's new strategic concept laid bare the intentions of the United States, the military alliance's de facto leader, to incite bloc confrontation by demonizing other countries and exploit the organization to maintain its hegemony worldwide.

NATO leaders on Wednesday approved the 2022 Strategic Concept, a blueprint laying out top imperatives and challenges for the next decade. It sets the alliance's joint position on emerging challenges, calling Russia the "most significant and direct threat" to NATO's security and accusing China of posing "systemic challenges" for the first time.

As a relic of the Cold War, NATO, which should have disbanded long ago, has become a handy tool for the United States to contain other countries, in particular, China and Russia. It is clear that the new document, covering the alliance's priorities and goals for the next 10 years, was actually designed to guide NATO on how to serve to maintain American hegemony in the future.

Such self-serving intentions deserve high alert of both Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Through the updated NATO document, the United States has tried to realize three strategic goals -- fomenting confrontation between Europe and Russia to continuously cripple Russia; urging Europe to strengthen its defense and using European resources to ease the pressure on American defense in Europe, and forcing the U.S. allies to join hands in suppressing China.

This exposes America's established Cold War mentality, in which Asia and Europe are the country's geopolitical cards, and only by sabotaging the relations between the two continents, can the world's sole superpower hold up its hegemony.

Unfortunately, although NATO has repeatedly claimed that its positioning as a regional alliance remains unchanged, it, in fact, has done quite the opposite. In the Asia-Pacific, the alliance has joined the United States in implementing the latter's divisive strategy and anti-China agenda for the sake of the Western dominance in the region.

In recent years, some NATO members have also worked with the United States to send planes and warships to China's adjacent waters for military operations, in a bid to stoke tension and provoke conflicts.

Yet the malicious intentions of the United States and NATO's erroneous words and actions have aroused the vigilance of people of insight all over the world, who have publicly opposed the U.S.-led NATO expansion to the Asia-Pacific region and called for strengthening cooperation with China.

Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana said NATO's expansion and its pursuit of a stronger presence in Asia will make it more difficult for NATO members to interact with other countries that do not see China or Russia as enemies or rivals, who do not want to take sides between China, Russia and the West. Solana warned that a "global NATO" or "NATO plus" could divide the world into adversarial blocs.

Before the new Strategic Concept was released, NATO members carefully negotiated "language that describes the security issues China presents for the Euro-Atlantic area while avoiding rhetoric that some allies would deem to be too inflammatory," according to U.S. media outlet Politico on Tuesday.

"We don't have a border with China, so it's a completely different context," Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs Joao Gomes Cravinho was quoted as saying.

History has proved that only mutually-beneficial cooperation, rather than playing bloc politics, can win over regional countries. Thus, Washington's self-serving geopolitical intentions and vicious attempts to drive wedges across the world are doomed to fail.

China is always a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a guardian of international order. China does not stir up trouble, but it is not afraid when others do. China will firmly and forcefully respond to any act that infringes upon China's interests.