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President Joe Biden made his first visit to Europe and held high-profile meetings at the G-7 conference in the English coastline resort of Carbis Bay and then with NATO members in Brussels.
And a top focus during both meetings was a country that was not even there: China.
Biden, who has made countering China a top goal of his administration, got fellow NATO members to issue a summit statement on Monday identifying China as a global security challenge and said its “assertive behavior presents systemic challenges to the rules-based international order,” according to The Associated Press.
The AP pointed out that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed after WWII to counter Russia, but now seems to identify China as its most formidable threat.
Beijing has been on the defensive after a statement from the G-7 that criticized China over human-rights abuses, its non-market policies, and its lack of transparency. The statement pointed out the country’s treatment of
Uyghurs in Xinjiang and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
China’s embassy in London responded to the 25-page communique in a statement urging the G-7 to “respect the facts, understand the situation, stop slandering China, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and stop harming China’s interest.”
The embassy said the facts have been distorted and exposed the “sinister intentions of a few countries such as the United States.”
The AP reported that the NATO leaders seemed to have different opinions of how best to approach China. The report pointed out that China, for example, is Germany’s top trading partner.
“I think it’s very important, just like we do in Russia, to always make the offer of political discussions, political discourse, in order to come up with solutions,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. “But where there are threats, and I said they’re in the hybrid field, too, then as NATO you have to be prepared.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that European countries do not want to get led into a confrontation with China, and are eager to keep their trade ties open.
The Journal, citing China’s Xinhua News Agency, pointed out that Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign policy official, called U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday to criticize the so-called international order and said it is based on “the false multilateralism of the interests of a ‘small circle’ or ‘clique politics.’”
TREND FORECAST: While the U.S. and NATO criticize China for their human rights abuses, absent in the media are the countless wars launched by the United States and its allies that have cost trillions, killed millions and destroyed entire nations. Indeed, many of the NATO nations continue to sell Saudi Arabia and its allies weaponry to kill Yemen civilians and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the United Nations.
Furthermore, as we have continually reported, the business of business is business and from manufacturing, private equity groups, hedge funds to banksters… China is the prime global marketplace for economic growth and investment. Thus the U.S./NATO talk about challenging China are merely empty words to make it appear that human rights and not the bottom line is the primary interest of the so-called “democracies.”