NATO pivots to highlight Chinese ‘challenges’ for 1st time

By JOSEPH WILSON, JILL LAWLESS and SYLVIE CORBET

MADRID (AP) — NATO has for the first time singled out China as one of its strategic priorities for the next decade, warning about its growing military ambitions, confrontational rhetoric toward Taiwan, and increasingly close ties to Russia. While Russia’s war against Ukraine has dominated discussions at the NATO summit, China earned a place Wednesday among the Western alliance’s most worrying security concerns. A NATO ten-year strategy document directed its harshest language at Russia, but the mere mention of China was significant; the 2010 document did not discuss China. The official turn by NATO puts the world’s largest military alliance based on the United States armed forces on guard against a country with a rapidly growing military.