OTTAWA—Canada and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are struggling to contend with a belligerent China on top of a revisionist Russia. It’s not unlike the motivation for the military alliance’s founding 70 years ago—to counter the communist Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War.
But it’s the commonalities between China’s and Russia’s aggression that are most worrisome for NATO and the Western world. In the case of Canada, it has endured China’s bullying for the last 12 months without offering anything more than expressions of diplomatic displeasure in response, although it has met the Russia threat with stronger rhetoric and a military presence in Latvia.
NATO is engaged on many fronts, with Russia’s threat to Western Europe always paramount. But Russia is not a world threat like China is, said Richard Fadden, former national security adviser to the Canadian prime minister, while speaking on a panel of defence experts hosted by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) in Ottawa on Dec. 2.
This sentiment is reflected in the London Declaration issued Dec. 4 by NATO leaders at the end of the organization’s two-day 70th-anniversary summit in London, U.K. The statement singles out China in a paragraph addressing cyber and other threats to society in areas such as critical infrastructure and energy and communications security.
“We recognize that China’s growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance,” reads the concluding sentence in that paragraph.
The peril from countries like China and Russia is that they are autocratic—they can turn on a dime—whereas the Western democracies are typically slow to react due to conflicting internal priorities.
Analogously, NATO has its own share of internal strife these days. An unsettled NATO presents fertile grounds for China—and Russia—to further their purposes.
The NATO ethos was muddied recently, with French President Emmanuel Macron on Nov. 28 calling the military alliance “brain dead” and his back-and-forth with Turkey for the country’s recent military action against the Kurds in Syria. The coalition of Western nations is not as cohesive as it can be.
Many have criticized the tone of Macron’s characterization, including U.S. President Donald Trump. During his visit to London on Dec. 3 for the NATO meeting, Trump said that Macron’s words were “nasty” and “disrespectful” and that, given the purpose NATO serves, “it’s a very dangerous statement for [Macron] to make.”
