NATO official warns Chinse missiles 'can reach US and Europe'
European powers must beware that China’s growing missile arsenal can threaten Western nations, according to a senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization official.
“When we start looking into new technologies, when we start looking into arms control, when we start looking about the fact that, let's say, Chinese missile capabilities can reach U.S. and Europe — at that moment, of course, we have to start becoming far more attentive also to the rise of China,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana told the Washington Examiner.
That warning sharpened a point that he made during a speech Friday at the Hudson Institute, when the former Romanian foreign minister said that “it’s high time for China” to join arms control agreements with Russia and the United States. Beijing’s growing stockpile of cruise missiles has stoked unease in Western circles, but the arms control question is just one of the issues calling for “an alliance of democracies,” as he phrased it following the speech.
“We are witnessing today an epochal fight for the commanding heights of how human societies are organized,” Geoana told the Hudson Institute audience. The fight, he said, is “between us, the ones that believe that democracy and free markets and open societies are the solution, and others that do believe that closed societies, authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, are the most efficient formula to govern modern societies.”
NATO does not operate in the Indo-Pacific region. The security bloc was founded in 1949 to deter threats emanating from Moscow, but the allies identified China for the first time as a source of "challenges and opportunities" following a December huddle in London. Geoana suggested that NATO members need to work with “like-minded democracies” in the region such as India to protect democratic systems of government.
“I believe that this is more of an alliance of democracies,” he told the Washington Examiner. “When it comes to certain geographies, which is transatlantic, NATO is the perfect instrument. When it comes to the rest of the world, we have to make sure that we shoulder each other's efforts and understand the interests and the needs of the others.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other members of the Trump administration have warned Western allies repeatedly that Beijing represents a threat. American officials believe that Beijing is refining and exporting a high-tech surveillance state to tyrannical governments while using economic clout to gain political influence and enhance spy capabilities in Western countries.
“There is a difference of quality in terms of how we see Russia and how we see China in the alliance,” Geoana said. “But the fact that we are seeing China both as a challenge and as an opportunity is reflecting, at the same time, the view coming from the U.S. and many other European countries that China is a nation that is changing the global balance of power.”
