https://www.rt.com/information/588532-eu-china-taiwan-nato/Former NATO chief urges EU to withstand China

Stopping navy escalation by China towards Taiwan ought to change into a precedence for the EU, former NATO Secretary Common Anders Fogh Rasmussen has mentioned, as a summit in Beijing later this week brings the 2 face-to-face.

Washington understands the hazard of the self-governed island falling underneath the management of Beijing, however “the identical can’t be mentioned for Europe,” Rasmussen, who headed the US-led navy bloc between 2009 and 2014, wrote in an opinion piece for the Monetary Instances on Monday.

Some EU leaders, like Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte or the Czech President Petr Pavel, have proven help for “Taiwan’s democracy,” whereas others like French President Emmanuel Macron have been “much less useful,” Rasmussen mentioned.

The previous NATO chief recalled Macron’s declaration in April that Europe “should not get caught up in crises that aren’t ours.” The message that Beijing bought from this comment “was that an assault on Taiwan could be met with a divided response from the democratic world,” he argued.

“If China did wrest management of the island, it might trigger extreme harm to Europe’s financial pursuits,” Rasmussen identified.

Taiwan, which is a self-governed island of 23.5 million that’s considered by China as a part of its territory, “produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and about 90% of probably the most superior ones. If Beijing managed this manufacturing, it might have a chokehold on the worldwide economic system, putting European governments and corporations ready of weak point,” he warned.

With main buying and selling routes going by way of the South China Sea, any navy escalation within the Taiwan Strait would additionally trigger “financial chaos” that might be “magnitudes increased than the worldwide turmoil attributable to wars within the Center East and Ukraine, even by the pandemic,” the previous NATO chief added.

“Stopping navy escalation by China within the Taiwan Strait ought to, due to this fact, be a precedence for the EU,” Rasmussen insisted.

The leaders of the bloc shall be “betraying their values” in the event that they don’t increase the problems of Chinese language “human rights abuses and navy provocations” throughout an EU-China summit scheduled to happen in Beijing on Thursday and Friday, he claimed.

China has been saying that it’s on the lookout for a peaceable reunification with Taiwan, however hasn’t utterly dominated out a navy possibility. Taiwanese Overseas Minister Joseph Wu informed German newspaper Tagesspiegel that “up to now, we don’t see any concrete navy preparations” for any assault by Beijing.