SINGAPORE — China tested Europe’s patience on Saturday when a veteran Chinese diplomat blamed Russia’s war on Ukraine on a failed security architecture in Europe.
It fell to Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren to challenge this very Chinese interpretation.
“I was actually a little surprised to hear that,” Ollongren told POLITICO in an interview shortly after she offered an off-the-cuff rebuttal to ex-ambassador Cui Tiankai at a panel at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “It’s very, very wrong.”
Cui, a former US envoy and unofficial adviser to the Chinese delegation at this top-level Asian security forum, said at Saturday’s event that Europe has had little success in ensuring the continent’s security, and suggested that other nations have done the same should do on the forum Take a lesson from China and Asia instead.
“We used to look to Europe because of its experience in regional integration. But these days, maybe people in Europe could look to us instead,” Cui told the gathering. “We’re not forcing our approach on you, but maybe you can learn something useful from our experience and success,” he said.
“And our region should also learn something very important – from your lack of success. I don’t want to use the word “failure”. [so] a lack of success,” said Cui, who sat on the panel alongside Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov.
“We will continue our Asian methods to manage our security situation and deal with any problems,” Cui said. “We don’t need Asian NATO. We do not want an expansion of NATO’s role in our region.”
While the Ukrainian minister avoided criticizing Beijing, merely saying that Ukraine must win the war and not negotiate, Ollongren hit back at Cui’s claim.
“The ambassador indicated that because of the war in Ukraine, Europe has not been able to manage its security very well. Of course I understand that there is a war in Ukraine – but I think that this is not the result of mismanagement of our security situation in Europe. “This is the result of not respecting the way we want to manage security in Europe,” said the Dutch minister.
“I also think that in Europe there is no lack of respect for China or for the culture of China; We have a lot of respect for that,” she said.
Ollongren, whose country has taken an increasingly critical stance towards China on relations with Russia and technological advances in the military sphere, added after the panel that what Cui outlined was a “misperception of the situation.”
“One cannot blame Europe or European countries for Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” she said.
Ollongren added that since Cui is no longer an ambassador, she will wait for Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu to lay out the official position in his keynote speech on Sunday.