China: US resembles ‘Don Quixote’ in seeing others as threats

GENEVA: China told the world’s main disarmament forum on Wednesday that U.S. foreign policy was destabilizing, baffling and redolent of Don Quixote, the Spanish fictional hero whose misplaced determination leads him on a series of doomed endeavors. “The Cold War mentality has come back to drive the security strategy and policy of a major power,” China’s disarmament ambassador Li Song told the Conference on Disarmament, a long-stalemated arena for arms talks at the United Nations in Geneva. “In particular the U.S. keeps saying other countries make it feel unsafe – this is truly baffling,” he said. Li was responding to U.S. calls for other nuclear powers to accept shared standards on nuclear weapons transparency, which he said represented an attempt by Washington to bully weaker powers into accepting a U.S.-designed set of rules. The idea of demanding such shared standards made a mockery of the situation the world was facing, Li said, with an international security environment characterized by a pervasive sense of insecurity, in which “unilateral and bullying practices” were the new forms of hegemony.