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By RFE/RL staff – Jul 18, 2024, 3:00 PM CDT
NATO is increasingly concerned about China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and is considering how to counter Chinese influence within its member states.
China faces economic challenges but also demonstrates strength in green energy industries, while its ties with Russia and Belarus deepen through joint military exercises.
The selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate raises questions about the future of US support for Ukraine and highlights a potential shift in focus towards countering China.
In a NATO summit in Washington centered on the war in Ukraine and extending support to Kyiv, the Western military alliance also took aim at China for being “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war” by supplying Moscow with dual-use products.
Finding Perspective: Beijing promptly batted away the label as “lies and smears” but the criticism continued to mount in Washington.
NATO has steadily increased its focus on China over the last several years, with Beijing’s support for Moscow amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine marking a tipping point for the alliance to shift how it views the world’s second-largest economy.
At the summit, which wrapped up on July 11, the joint declaration by all 32 NATO members warned about unspecified consequences to “its interests and reputation” for enabling “the largest war in Europe in recent history.”
Speaking on stage in Washington, Benedetta Berti, NATO’s policy planning director, said that China’s steady supply of critical dual-use goods was the reason why Russia has been able to keep waging its war against Ukraine.
And while there was no official announcement, several NATO officials said that the alliance was discussing how — and whether — it could reclaim some Chinese-owned infrastructure projects in its member states. Those investments are now seen as security liabilities should a wider conflict with Russia break out in the future.
For NATO, such moves are seen as giving China a choice: stop supporting Russia’s war effort and build a constructive relationship with the West or be treated as an adversary.
NATO also invited Indo-Pacific partners Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea to Washington, where they discussed how to deepen cooperation and coordinate pushback against potential Chinese designs in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the region.
Counterprogramming: There were signs, however, that this message was not well received.
On the eve of the NATO summit, China and Belarus kicked off 11 days of joint military exercises near the Belarusian city of Brest, some 5 kilometers from the Polish border, as I reported here.
Beijing said the exercises were not directed at any particular country, but Vladimir Kupriyanyuk, the deputy head of the General Staff of the Belarusian armed forces, said the maneuvers were a response to the “West’s aggressive foreign policy toward Belarus” and to “Ukrainian provocation.”
While small in scope, the drills highlight growing cooperation between Beijing and Minsk at a time of high tensions.
As Katia Glod, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me, that’s valuable for Belarus’s autocratic leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, as he spars with the West, but looks to balance his dependence on Russia with a tighter embrace of Beijing.
In addition to the drills in Belarus, Chinese and Russian naval forces kicked off a joint exercise at a military port in southern China on July 14.
Why It Matters: Realistically, there are few cards up NATO’s sleeve that can stop Chinese companies from assisting Russia’s war effort, but the alliance can apply new pressure on Beijing in Europe and elsewhere.
NATO is a defensive alliance focused on Europe and there has been concern and pushback from its members over too much emphasis on Asia, but as the maneuvers in Belarus show, China is also active along the alliance’s borders in Europe.
Beyond the new messaging against China, the elephant in the room at the summit was the looming U.S. presidential election and former U.S. President Donald Trump leading the polls.
Both Trump — and J.D. Vance, his newly announced running mate — have been critical of NATO in the past and many on the Republican side are advocating for drawing down U.S. support for Ukraine in order to better direct resources towards China and the Indo-Pacific.
But as China’s close ties with Russia and the series of drills around the NATO summit show, those two different theaters in Europe and Asia are becoming increasingly blurred together.
Three More Stories From Eurasia China’s Big Economic MeetingAfter months of unexplained delay, top officials from China’s ruling Communist Party gathered in Beijing on July 15 for the so-called third plenum, a major closed-door meeting held roughly once every five years to map out the general direction of the country’s long-term social and economic policies.
The Details: The conclave is important because it signals the direction forward for the Chinese economy as it faces major challenges and deepening tensions with the West.
China’s businesses and consumers have suffered in recent years through stumbling growth, a property-sector meltdown, and a blight of debt among local governments.
Officially, China’s economy is doing well. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 5.3 percent year on year in the first quarter, a solid rate that Beijing says validates its strategy of redirecting resources away from property and local government infrastructure projects, which once drove nearly a third of the economy, and into advanced industry instead.
Proof of the success of this new model, Chinese officials say, is China’s emerging dominance of green-energy-transition industries such as electric vehicles. A new report from Global Energy Monitor found that China is building two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects, and that figure doesn’t even include the expansion under way outside of the country.
But the country is also dealing with economic problems on the back of years of stringent pandemic controls that have triggered mounting social frustration over falling property prices and reduced employment opportunities that have seen ordinary Chinese curb their spending.
On July 15, Beijing released new data that showed a sharp slowdown in economic growth. China also registered a record $99 billion trade surplus in June, adding to concerns that Beijing is leaning on exports to try and pull itself out of an economic slump.
Taiwan For Ukraine?At the Republican National Convention on July 15, Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as vice president on his ticket.
Vance has been one of the U.S. Congress’s most vocal opponents of aid for Ukraine and previously stated the biggest threat to the United States was a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
What You Need To Know: While it’s by no means clear how much sway Vance would have over a future Trump administration’s foreign policy, it’s safe to say that his selection amplified doubts about continued U.S. support for Kyiv should Trump be elected.
As a senator, Vance has said that he wants to limit U.S. attention on Europe and reorient the country’s resources toward countering China’s rise.
In February, Vance told the Munich Security Conference that the United States needed to focus its efforts in Asia instead of Ukraine, » …
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