China on Thursday urged NATO to stop "stoking confrontation," as well as to "abandon Cold War mentality."
"If NATO truly cares about the security in Europe and the world, it should stop fanning the flames and stoking confrontation," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a live-streamed news conference in Beijing.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, at the NATO Public Forum on Tuesday, had said the bloc "was not established only to fight the Russians if they would attack us. They are our most immediate, long- term threats, immediate and long-term."
"But we also see China reconstituting itself. We see what China, North Korea and Iran are doing in supporting the war effort of Russia, the unprovoked war against Ukraine," Rutte said.
Guo called the remarks as "vilifying China's normal military development" and "another excuse of NATO in order to drastically increase the military spending and reach beyond its border, so as to have presence in the Asia-Pacific.”
Guo said that while "NATO claims itself as a regional organization," it continues to "reaching beyond the political scope defined in its treaty and uses Eurasian connectivity as an excuse to have a presence in the Asia-Pacific."
China urged NATO to "take a hard look at what it has done, heed the call for justice in the international community, abandon the Cold War mentality of global confrontation, as well as the zero-sum game. These are outdated concepts," Guo said.
NATO, at the summit in Netherlands this week, endorsed a higher defense spending goal of 5% of national outputs by 2035 – a response to demands from Trump and to Europeans’ fears that Russia may pose a growing threat to their security.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that NATO's combined military expenditure was 55% of the global spending in 2024.
"NATO still asked its members to drastically increase their military spending to 5% of GDP in order to build a more lethal NATO with ulterior motives," Guo said.
Last year, China accounted for half of all expenditure in Asia and was the second-largest military spender in the world, raising its budget to an estimated $314 billion, a 7% increase compared to 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Guo said that Beijing will "firmly safeguard its sovereignty, security, development and interests."
Separately, Chinese Defense Ministry Zhang Xiaogang on Thursday urged the US to "abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, and stop sending wrong signals to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces," after the US approved a $500 million budget for military assistance to Taiwan for 2026.
