U.S. President Joe Biden told fellow NATO leaders on Monday the defence of Europe, Turkey and Canada was a “sacred obligation” for the United States, a marked shift from his predecessor Donald Trump’s threats to withdraw from the military alliance.
Arriving in Brussels from the weekend’s G7 summit in England, Mr. Biden again sought to rally Western allies to support a U.S. strategy to contain China’s military rise as well as showing unity in the face of Russian aggression.
“Article Five is a sacred obligation,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the transatlantic alliance’s collective defence pledge. “I want all Europe to know that the U.S. is there,” he said after arriving in his black presidential limousine.
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“NATO is critically important to us,” said Mr. Biden, who is seeking to mend ties after Mr. Trump’s denigration of the nuclear-armed alliance over the past four years and what Mr. Trump said were its “delinquent” members.
Allies are expected to brand China a security risk to the Western alliance for the first time, a day after the Group of Seven rich nations issued a statement on human rights in China and Taiwan that Beijing said slandered its reputation.
Mr. Biden said both Russia and China were not acting “in a way that is consistent with what we had hoped”, referring to Western efforts since the mid-1990s to bring both countries into the fold of liberal democracies.
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