China’s expanding arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach the United States and Europe, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) official said on Monday.
NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana warned, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, that NATO allies must become more alert to the threat China poses.
“When we start looking into new technologies, when we start looking into arms control, when we start looking about the fact that, let’s say, Chinese missile capabilities can reach U.S. and Europe — at that moment, of course, we have to start becoming far more attentive also to the rise of China,” Geoana said.
Geoana’s statement echoes previous comments he made at the Hudson Institute on Friday in which he said the fight between the United States and China is “between us, the ones that believe that democracy and free markets and open societies are the solution, and others that do believe that closed societies, authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, are the most efficient formula to govern modern societies.”
“We are witnessing today an epochal fight for the commanding heights of how human societies are organized,” Geoana said.
The former Romanian foreign minister believes that China needs to join the United States and Russia’s arms control agreement.
“There is a difference of quality in terms of how we see Russia and how we see China in the alliance,” Geoana said. “But the fact that we are seeing China both as a challenge and as an opportunity is reflecting, at the same time, the view coming from the U.S. and many other European countries that China is a nation that is changing the global balance of power, which is an understatement.”
China, Russia and Iran recently participated in a joint wargame to send a “message to the world.”
“The purpose of the war game is to ensure collective security and help strengthen security in the northern region of the Indian Ocean, which is witnessing incidents such as piracy,” Iranian navy commander Rear Adm. Hossein Khanzadi said in a statement
China displayed some of its nuclear arsenal during its National Day of the People’s Republic of China Celebration in October.to serve as a threat to the United States’ global hegemony, sending another message to the U.S.
A recent report warned that China could beat the U.S. in a potential conflict, thanks to the country’s emphasis on creating artificial intelligence and rapidly expanding its military.
“Chinese firms and research institutes are advancing uses of AI that could undermine U.S. economic leadership and provide an asymmetrical advantage in warfare,” the report said. “Chinese military strategists see AI as a breakout technology that could enable China to rapidly modernize its military, surpassing overall U.S. capabilities and developing tactics that specifically target U.S. vulnerabilities.”
