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Macron blocks NATO outpost in Japan amid Chinese complaints
(www.politico.eu)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Can you elaborate on the terrible message? I don’t think China prefers US to be in their backyard than NATO. NATO is purely defensive, so unless China had intentions to attack a NATO country it wouldn’t matter. But US has multiple defence agreements with some countries in the region and some of them is on China’s crosshairs. Which makes a confrontation with US higher then with NATO.
The terrible message is precisely that NATO is only defensive in theory, but is willing to expand into the Pacific to defend a territory that is nowhere near its original purview.
The problem with the "purely defensive" argument is that historically, NATO Article 5 has been invoked to declare a war on a country that only indirectly threatened a NATO ally's regional stability. That's how NATO ended up bombing Serbia, which was doing despicable things to Albanians, but was not threatening NATO sovereignty to a degree that justifies Article 5.
Add these two together and China's opposition to a NATO presence in the Pacific makes a whole lot of sense.