Russia’s War Has Wrecked Beijing’s Hopes of Keeping NATO Away

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently concluded a visit to South Korea and Japan. Given there’s a war raging to the alliance’s east, it’s clear how seriously NATO’s leadership views its relationships with these two partners. Considering Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s remarks at the 2022 Shangri-La Dialogue—that “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow”—it seems likely that NATO’s partners are equally concerned about the future—and that there’s a burning interest in what’s happening in Europe. Kishida’s own visit to Ukraine confirmed this concern.

While Beijing has long resisted what it deems interference in its neighborhood by outside powers, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have finally forced NATO to pay attention to Asia in a way that no amount of complaining from Beijing will reverse.

While its geographic focus does not overlap with Asia, NATO’s relationships with Japan and South Korea are substantial, dating back to the Cold War in the case of Japan. Tokyo initiated informal dialogues between the two in 1979 and continued into the 1980s as Japan attempted to engage NATO regarding its security concerns about ongoing arms control negotiations. That relationship was formalized in the 1990s, making Tokyo NATO’s oldest partner outside Europe. Ties expanded rapidly from 2001, when Japan sent military forces into the Indian Ocean to support U.S. and European ships engaged in combat operations against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. South Korea’s dialogue with NATO began in 2005, but a number of NATO members are also “sending states,” which contribute forces to the United Nations Command committed to defending South Korea in the event of an attack from Pyongyang. Both states supported Afghan reconstruction efforts as well as serve as contributing participants to NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence.

Seoul is a particularly valuable partner to NATO on the issue of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, given the alliance’s considerable interest in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The partners cooperate on a range of related activities and South Korea is a regular participant in NATO’s annual conference on weapons of mass destruction. South Korea’s domestically produced defense articles are increasingly attractive in Europe as well, and Stoltenberg took advantage of his visit to publicly urge South Korea to provide weapons directly to Ukraine, given its particular capacity to produce the artillery shells and ammunition Kyiv direly needs.

But the chief threats facing NATO and its partners are not confined to either the North Atlantic or East Asia. As Stoltenberg himself has stated, many contemporary threats transcend geography. Cyberoperations and pandemics do not respect national borders. North Korea’s nuclear saber-rattling is not only a threat to South Korea, but to Japan and the United States as well as NATO—a nuclear threat that could tip the world into war. And now, with China’s tacit support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and rumors that China may risk direct material aid to Moscow, there is an emerging axis of nuclear powers with advanced hypersonic weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that threatens the international order that NATO was created to protect.

While China’s own ambitions are in Asia, its forces are increasingly present in NATO’s backyard, where the alliance’s mutual defense treaty applies. Beijing’s economic interests, which are often intertwined with its geopolitical ones, continue to manifest themselves across Europe in the form of investments in port facilities and other key sectors.

This Chinese presence, as well as Beijing’s efforts in subverting the rules-based order, has not gone unnoticed by NATO. The 2022 NATO summit—which both Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol attended—was not the first time a reference to China appeared in a major NATO speech but was remarkable in highlighting the People’s Republic of China as a systemic threat to the alliance’s “interests, security, and values.” Beijing wasted no time in lambasting these comments and is still publicly decrying them nearly a year later.

China’s fears of NATO expansion into the Indo-Pacific are, however, overblown. Both sides of the Atlantic are already straining to supply Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion, and there is little appetite within the alliance to expand its geographic scope. But three NATO members are still resident powers in the Indo-Pacific—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The U.K. is also part of the Five Power Defense Arrangements (FPDA), which is a security arrangement between it, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore dating back to 1971. Britain’s security is intrinsically linked to the region’s. France regularly rotates military forces through the Indo-Pacific and the U.K. is increasingly present, having deployed one of its aircraft carriers to the region in 2021 and sent two offshore patrol vessels on a five-year deployment later that year.

But while it is unlikely to expand its geographic scope that dramatically, NATO’s interest in the security of the Indo-Pacific will only deepen as China’s efforts to change existing geopolitical architectures continue. NATO members are undertaking high-profile naval missions to the region, with a total of 21 ships sent by various states in 2021—a number that does not include the ships of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. NATO members such as Germany have committed themselves to continued military engagement.

The alliance’s newly launched initiative, “Futures in the Indo-Pacific,” aims to convene experts from Belgium, Australia, France, and Japan to analyze events in the Indo-Pacific with an eye to their possible impacts on Euro-Atlantic security. India, famously wedded to its policy of nonalignment, may also be increasing its engagement with the alliance, much to Beijing’s chagrin.

The frequency and tenor of Beijing’s protests against NATO’s engagement in the region highlight how much of a problem this is for its ambitions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has alerted NATO and others that wars of territorial aggression are not a thing of the past and made the prospect of an invasion of Taiwan seem much more real. The enormously destructive knock-on effects of Russia’s invasion would be dwarfed by Beijing subjugating Taiwan, both in geoeconomic terms as well as its effects on the international system.

While NATO’s mutual defense treaty obligations do not extend to the Indo-Pacific, its members’ interests are deeply intertwined with the region’s future. Like Japan and South Korea, other regional states including Australia and New Zealand are increasingly attracted to deepening engagement and exchanges with NATO as an avenue for internationalizing deterrence of would-be aggressors, including the issue of Chinese revisionism on its borders and upon the oceans. While Beijing has long opposed the internationalization of its many disputes with its neighbors, Russia’s war has dashed any chance of keeping others out of its quarrels.