China on Thursday called on NATO to stop encouraging confrontation and to abandon the Cold War mentality.
“If NATO truly cares about security in Europe and the world, it should stop fueling the fire and encouraging confrontation,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun at a press conference in Beijing.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said at the NATO Public Forum on Tuesday that the bloc was not established only to fight against Russia, although it is the most immediate, long-term threat to the Alliance.
“We also see how China is reconstituting itself. We see what China, North Korea, and Iran are doing by supporting Russia’s war efforts in the war against Ukraine,” said Rutte.
Guo called those comments “slandering of China’s normal military development” and “yet another excuse by NATO to drastically increase military spending to have a presence in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Guo said that although NATO presents itself as a regional organization, it continues to go beyond the political framework defined in its treaty and uses Eurasian connectivity as an excuse for its presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
China has called on NATO to “carefully consider its actions, listen to the call for justice from the international community, abandon the Cold War mentality of global confrontation, as well as the zero-sum game,” which Guo called outdated concepts.
At the summit in the Netherlands, NATO supported the greater defense spending target of 5 percent of the national product by 2035, which was a direct response to Trump’s demands and Europeans’ fears that Russia could pose an increasing threat to their security.
The spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that NATO’s combined military expenditures accounted for 55 percent of global spending in 2024.
“NATO continues to ask its members to drastically increase their military spending to five percent of GDP to build a more deadly NATO with hidden motives,” said Guo.
Last year, China accounted for half of all spending in Asia and was the second-largest military spender in the world, increasing its budget to an estimated 314 billion dollars, which is a 7 percent increase compared to 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Guo said that Beijing “will firmly protect its sovereignty, security, development, and interests.”
