Beijing: 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.

According to Anadolu Agency, 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." Rutte added, "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."

Guo called the remarks "vilifying China's normal military development" and accused NATO of using it as "another excuse to drastically increase military spending and reach beyond its border, so as to have presence in the Asia-Pacific." He emphasized that while "NATO claims itself as a regional organization," it continues to extend its influence beyond its defined political scope, using Eurasian connectivity as a reason to establish 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 These are outdated concepts," Guo said.

The NATO summit held in the Netherlands this week saw the endorsement of a higher defense spending goal of 5% of national outputs by 2035, a move seen as a response to demands from former US President Donald Trump and to European concerns over Russian threats. Guo highlighted that NATO's combined military expenditure was projected to be 55% of 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," he stated.

Last year, China accounted for half of all expenditure in Asia and was the second-largest military spender globally, raising its budget to an estimated $314 billion, a 7% increase compared to 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Guo stressed that Beijing will "firmly safeguard its sovereignty, security, development and interests."

In a related development, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang on Thursday urged the US to "abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqu©s, and stop sending wrong signals to the 'Taiwan independence' separatist forces," following the US approval of a $500 million budget for military assistance to Taiwan for 2026.