Senior Chinese Diplomat Calls NATO Eastward Expansion Recipe for Disaster

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng warned on Friday that an attempt by the United States to fix European security issues with NATO expansion could only lead to a greater disaster.

The diplomat criticized those who claimed that the Russian special operation in Ukraine validated NATO expansion eastward, saying they "take the root cause as the prescription."

"NATO’s continued eastward expansion has upset security in Europe and created a big mess… Given this, to resolve the crisis by further expansion would be like correcting one mistake with another," he told an online security dialogue of G20 think-tanks.

He slammed Western countries for their Cold-War mentality and power politics, including threats of secondary sanctions against China if it did not jump on their bandwagon. He said the Ukraine crisis proved that Europe’s security policy was outdated and its mindset "ossified."

"They might be holding in their hands smart phones of the globalized age, but their minds are still operating with last century’s system of Cold War mentality. It’s no surprise that Europe’s security system is experiencing a ‘downtime’," Le Yucheng argued.

He said the US had also been sowing discord on China’s doorstep in the Asia-Pacific, creating exclusive anti-China groups and testing Beijing’s red lines on Taiwan.

"If this is not an Asia-Pacific version of NATO’s eastward expansion, then what is? Such a strategy, if left unchecked, would bring horrible consequences and push the Asia-Pacific over the edge of an abyss," he said.

The diplomat warned that replicating the Ukrainian scenario in Taiwan was not possible because the island nation was inseparable from China. He said that the US, a guarantor of European peace, should "take the right lesson" from the Ukrainian conflict after Europe's security imploded.