No Need For An Asian NATO To Counter China

The United States and its allies in Europe and Asia have tried to mitigate these threats by pooling resources and strengthening communication on issues of shared concern. Cooperation tends to revolve around bilateral and mini-lateral formulations.

The United Kingdom and Japan finalized a Reciprocal Access Agreement in 2023 establishing procedures for the UK military and Japanese Self-Defense Forces to visit one another's countries for joint exercises and training. Japan pursues a similar agreement with France.

Germany and France have sent their naval and air forces to the Indo-Pacific, both as a show of resolve to China and because European states have a vested interest in preserving freedom of navigation. In 2023, Berlin deployed its first warship to the South China Sea in nearly two decades.

The United States, meanwhile, is regularizing trilateral naval drills with Japan and South Korea, and with Japan and the Philippines, to boost interoperability among their respective forces.

NATO has never been far from the conversation. While Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea all have long-standing relationships with the transatlantic alliance, those were often seen as more symbolic than substantive. They certainly weren't formed with a specific adversarial country in mind.

No longer. NATO is now explicitly referencing China in summit communiques. In 2019, the alliance stated that“China's growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an alliance.”

The language is noticeably tougher in NATO's 2022 Strategic Concept, highlighting China's confrontational rhetoric,“malicious hybrid and cyber operations” and exploitation of economic leverage over smaller states.

There is now a general sense that NATO, crafted in the early days of the Cold War to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union, should be re-purposed to counter China-or at least play a part in it. Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis has even suggested bringing Japan, South Korea and Australia into the alliance.

That NATO's competitors and adversaries are increasingly making common cause with each other is not a good enough reason to move NATO out of area. Granted, NATO has engaged in missions outside the European theater, from the occupation of Afghanistan to training the Iraqi army in Iraq and leading a bombing campaign in Libya.

Yet transforming NATO into an Indo-Pacific security guarantor or institutionalizing its relationship with IP4 countries would create internal difficulties within the alliance and compound the security problems NATO and its Asian partners want to address.

First, the divisions within NATO: At present there is no consensus on expanding NATO's remit to include Asia, particularly with the explicit goal to contain Chinese power. NATO members have varying reasons for avoiding it.

French President Emmanuel Macron's opposition centers on concerns that incorporating Asian security matters into NATO's official business would degrade the alliance's traditional focus on deterrence in Europe.

France, particularly under Macron, also doesn't want to burn bridges with China or do anything to increase the risk of a direct military confrontation with China, however implausible it may seem. These worries led Macron to veto the opening of a NATO liaison office in Tokyo last year.

For Germany, the issue has less to do with promoting Indo-Pacific security per se and more about preserving Berlin's €250 billion ($274 billion) trade relationship with China, Germany's largest trading partner for the last eight years.

Hungary is strengthening relations with China, so any attempt to bring the alliance out-of-area likely will be stonewalled by Budapest out of self-interest.

Second, outside the United States and perhaps the United Kingdom, it's unclear whether NATO members possess the hard power, platforms and capacity to markedly increase deterrence in Asia. Europe's defense industrial complex is stretched thin, with the bulk of production going to a land war on the continent that won't end in the short term.

France has obligations in the Pacific, but its overseas territories are thousands of miles from the First Island Chain and wouldn't be all that useful in a war-time contingency.

The most Germany could offer is the occasional freedom-of-navigation exercise in the region's key choke points, symbolic operations difficult to sustain given Berlin's three consecutive decades of defense cuts.

Third, China, Russia and North Korea won't sit by passively in the event of a more Asia-focused NATO. All three are likely to respond to maintain a favorable balance of power in the region.

Sign up for one of our free newsletters

• The Daily Report Start your day right with Asia Times' top stories
• AT Weekly Report A weekly roundup of Asia Times' most-read stories

China has long been suspicious that NATO, at Washington's urging, will extend into East Asia to buttress US power, hem China in strategically and undermine what Chinese leaders regard as the PRC's rightful place in international politics. In this scenario, China might want to activate its“no limits” partnership with Russia to make it a critical counterweight.

Joint Russia-China military exercises would become larger and more frequent, and any campaign to create wedges between the two - small to begin with - would be lost. China could even reassess its current opposition to a formal trilateral grouping with Russia and North Korea, if only to demonstrate that policies have consequences.

None of this would be welcomed by Southeast Asian countries, which have repeatedly warned of the dangers of the region's further militarization.

Conclusion

Rather than elevate Asia on the NATO agenda, the United States, Canada and European allies should keep the North Atlantic military organization in the North Atlantic area of responsibility.

The top US, Canadian and European priorities in Asia, maintaining adequate balance of power with China and avoiding a war that would cause immense casualties and trillions of dollars in lost global revenue, can be accomplished without extra-territorial alliances heavily dependent on US military power.

The most effective way to achieve this with the least amount of risk is for the United States and European states to build on bilateral relationships with individual East Asian countries like Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia, all of which are modernizing their own militaries to defend their prerogatives against a militarily superior China.

None of these powers needs a foreign military bloc to explain why a stable balance of power in Asia is in the collective interest.

Daniel R. DePetris (... ) is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, DC.

Already have an account? Sign i Sign up here to comment on Asia Times stories OR

Thank you for registering!

An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.