China’s growing military prowess and increasingly aggressive foreign policy have revived talk among U.S. and European officials of creating an “Asian NATO” of regional powers to contain communist Beijing’s expansionist ambitions.
Past efforts for an East Asian security alliance, such as the post-World War II Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to guard against Cold War-era communism, failed to gain lasting traction.
But that was before China’s emergence as a rising superpower — a reality NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said is “fundamentally shifting the global balance of power” in ways should motivate NATO itself to “become more global.”Read more…
