NATO’s Planned Liaison Office in Japan Will Accelerate the Expansion Of AUKUS+
NATO might soon attempt to patrol the Taiwan Strait in order to provoke a security incident with China that could then further speed up its regional hegemonic plans.
“The US Is Rounding Up Allies Ahead Of A Possible War With China”, which the former plans to fight via the emerging alliance system that can be described as AUKUS+ if it unfolds. This refers to that regional group’s function as the core of a larger anti-Chinese network that informally includes Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea. NATO will also obviously play a role too, with that bloc building upon its Secretary-General’s related statement of intent by opening a liaison office in Japan.
Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told CNN that this development is supposedly due to the Ukrainian Conflict making the entire world less stable, but the reality is that this is part of a preplanned move to more effectively coordinate the containment of China. It would have happened on a different pretext had that aforementioned conflict’s latest phase not broken out last year, but that event provided a convenient excuse for speeding up their plans and disguising them as anti-Russian instead.
NATO’s liaison office in Japan will serve as that alliance’s first official outpost in the Asia-Pacific, thus enabling it to more directly organize AUKUS+’s expansion. Assembling that regional dimension of this emerging system is important in and of itself, but the European one is indispensable for maximally pressuring China. It’s therefore expected that more countries from the continent will soon dispatch vessels to the region as part of the joint operations that the liaison office will organize.
This is precisely what EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had in mind when suggesting late last month that member states should patrol the Taiwan Strait. Since practically every EU member is also part of NATO, this de facto amounts to that alliance doing this, which is dangerous due to the risk of this provoking an incident with China that could prompt the implementation of Article 5. That’s probably the point though, namely to create a crisis that can justify the further acceleration of AUKUS+’s expansion.
Nothing good is therefore expected to come from the opening of NATO’s planned liaison office in Japan. This development will only destabilize the Asia-Pacific, put additional pressure on China, and thus take the chance that whatever incident transpires as a result is capable of being contained. It’s an irresponsible risk, but NATO has convinced itself that it’s worth taking in order to sped up its regional hegemonic plans.
