NATO should beware US love of walls

The White House did not specify what topics United States President Donald Trump and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg will discuss at their working meeting scheduled for Thursday. But the latter will almost certainly get an earful of US worries about its European allies embracing telecommunications equipment from China. Even if not from the US president himself. He has maintained a distance between himself and the all-out assault by some members of his administration on Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, in order to leave himself some wriggle room.

So although Chinese 5G, especially Huawei, will feature heavily as a priority US concern at the working level, the ministerial meetings in particular, the US president apparently intends to devote his efforts to once again pressing his country’s NATO allies to pay more for their own protection, as leverage for greater obedience to its cause.

Although the White House has called NATO “obsolete”, Washington is counting on NATO to play its hatchet man in confronting what it sees as threats from Russia and particularly China.

Two weeks ago at a meeting of NATO defense chiefs, US Defense Secretary Mike Esper again underlined Washington’s anxiety over Chinese telecom products being integrated into European infrastructure. And last Friday, US State Secretary

Mike Pompeo, while vilifying Chinese engagement with Europe, again warned Germany against using Huawei technologies in its 5G network.

However, getting the other members of NATO to rally to that cause may prove difficult.

French President Emmanuel Macron just declared the alliance “brain dead”, and whether the other European nations view that to be the case or not, NATO is certainly experiencing an efficacy problem. And one cannot look past the US’ withering moral authority inside the alliance as being the reason for this.

The organization looked on while Turkey, with a green light from the US, went it alone and invaded Syria in open disregard of the concerns of some NATO members. It was caught unawares by the US president’s abrupt decision to withdraw US troops from the country. That was widely perceived to be a sign that the once potent trans-Atlantic alliance is losing its relevance.

It is to be hoped that it will not try to reassert itself by assuming the role of proxy for the US in that country’s ambitious yet morally problematic and technically unlikely offensive to deter Chinese technological progress, as that will simply build a new wall to divide the world 30 years after the Berlin Wall was torn down.

That would in no way serve European interests. Indeed, it would serve no one’s interests.