Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand sent their defense ministers to a NATO Defense Ministers' meeting on Thursday. While their heads of state and others have attended before, this was the first time these countries' defense ministers joined. This more military-operative attendance signals that NATO is serious about its expansion into this region. From a politico-psychological angle, it also shows that expansion for the sake of expansion has become the raison d'etre of the once-defensive alliance. NATO has been searching for such a reason to exist ever since the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved 33 years ago, and, by all logic, it ought to have been closed down, too.

The expansion happens in violation of NATO's Treaty of 1949. That Treaty is a "copy" of the UN Charter, refers disputes to the UN and states in Article 5 that members of the alliance are obliged to support any member should it be attacked from the outside. 

Today, NATO has 32 members, but - incrementally and virtually without international attention - it has added 38 partner countries worldwide, including the four mentioned above.

One common sense and legal question arises: How far can an organization deviate from its legal foundation without being investigated for possible illegal conduct, and which institution has the authority to investigate?

According to NATO, one of the "security developments" that motivates its creeping expansion in the "Indo-Pacific" region is China's "stated ambitions and coercive policies in various domains. Partnership network strengthens security outside NATO territory, which makes NATO itself safer."

Regrettably, NATO's homepage does not contain any rational, empirically solid, multi-dimensional analysis that substantiates that China is a "threat" or "challenge" to NATO's members. The alliance today runs on postulates and outdated offensive deterrence and defense thinking. China is a problem because it has different values and interests. It sounds increasingly like sermons to a church congregation.

According to a June 2023 report by the US Congressional Research Service about US infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific, "the US maintains and uses at least 66 significant defense sites spread across the region." 

In addition, the costs of the West's permanent, and increasing, naval presence and the tremendous costs of AUKUS, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, have increased. 

AUKUS Pillar I is about Australia acquiring nuclear-powered attack submarines and hosting such submarines from the US and UK. Pillar 2 is about intensified collaboration in these high-tech areas: undersea capabilities, quantum technologies, AI and autonomy, advanced cyber, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities, as well as electronic warfare.

But the costs of upholding a worldwide militarist empire are unimaginably high and self-destructive: In 2023, US military expenditures reached $916 billion (at least, lots of items are not in the Pentagon budget), which is equal to 3.4 percent of its GDP. It is roughly as large as the next nine top-ranking countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Given these facts and the fact that it is the US that builds up tensions against China and not the other way around - nobody threatens the West - it is impossible to find any empirically solid reason for the US and NATO to postulate that China is a "threat" or "challenge." The mere suggestion seems to be pathological, a psycho-political paranoia growing out of, first, the subconscious but denied sense of relative decline and, second, the permanent need for enemies to legitimize the existence of the out-of-democratic control the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, or what I call MIMAC, that the US has or, rather, is.

Macro historical studies of the decline of empires point to causes, such as over-militarization, shrinking legitimacy in the eyes of others, decline on all other power dimensions but the military and - of special importance - over-extension: the empire grows beyond management or control with a declining economic carrying capacity.

And that’s when we can hope to create a much better, peaceful and cooperative world. Remember, over the rainbow, the skies are still blue. So, too in the “Indo-Pacific.”

The author is the director of the Sweden-based think tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn