MOSCOW, March 11. /TASS/. The main interests of US President Donald Trump’s administration lie in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC), and Europe gets offended that Washington pays less attention to it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after talks with Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Feridun Sinirlioglu.
"A few years ago, our NATO colleagues, starting with the administration of [former US President Joe] Biden, began increasingly focusing on the Indo-Pacific region, rather than the Asia-Pacific, as a special priority for the United States. By the way, the Trump administration also supported this shift, emphasizing that Washington’s main interests are now in the eastern part of Eurasia and along the Pacific coast. Thus, Europeans got offended by the reduced attention from the United States," Lavrov said.
"Yet long before the current administration, the United States began promoting the concept of North Atlantic Alliance responsibility for essentially the entire Eurasian continent. Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was asked why they were so active in the Indo-Pacific region, establishing AUKUS — the US, Britain, and Australia — an alliance with a nuclear component, creating various 'fours' and 'threes,' including the US, South Korea, and Japan, where they also plan exercises involving nuclear weapons, and promoting a whole range of other limited, non-inclusive structures there. Since NATO, they ask Stoltenberg, is an alliance that has declared and still declares the defense of the territories of its member states as its goal," Lavrov continued. "Stoltenberg says: that's the way it is, we still do only what is necessary to protect the territories of our member states, but the threats to these territories now come from the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and so on."
Russia's top diplomat pointed out that "in the absence of a pan-continental security structure in Eurasia, NATO members have already ‘begun working to dominate all security processes on this vast continent.’" "It is clear that this is an unacceptable idea, as it drastically undermines the fundamental principle of the indivisibility of security, which is embedded in OSCE documents. We strongly hope that Mr. Secretary General and his team will uphold the need for all OSCE participating states to strictly respect what their presidents have signed up to," he said.