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Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts
This week NATO is convening its three-day summit in Washington, celebrating its 75th birthday. Much has been talked about Ukraine, of course. One of the highlights of this year’s summit however is the issue of Asia – China appearing in this summit’s declaration again (this being the third time in a row). The Asian superpower was described as a “decisive enabler” in Russia’s conflict against Ukraine. The document further describes Beijing as posing “systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.”
Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister told his Thai counterpart Maris Sangiampongsa in Beijing this week that “It is necessary to resist the negative impact of the Indo-Pacific strategy and guard against NATO reaching out to the Asia-Pacific.” This was a message to ASEAN countries in general.
The matter of opening a NATO office in Tokyo is part of this larger context. It is not officially on this week’s agenda, but Tobias Billström (Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs) has said that NATO members are likely to bring the issue up with France soon (Paris opposes it). It was discussed last year, and often described in very humble terms. According to a 2023 Reuters report:
“NATO officials have said the proposed Japan office would be small, with a staff of only a few people focused on building partnerships, and would not be a military base.”
Last year, this seemingly modest proposal (heavily criticized by China) was nevertheless blocked by France’s President Emmanuel Macro, who, at the time, said that, although the Alliance should have partners “with whom we manage major security issues in the Indo-Pacific, Africa and also the Middle East”, NATO “remains an organization of the North Atlantic Treaty.” Macron added, ironically, that “whatever one says, geography is stubborn: the Indo-Pacific isn’t the North Atlantic.” As I wrote back in 2021, Paris is still a global player, and has its own interests in the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) and globally – and sometimes they clash with NATO and Washington in a number of issues.
This relatively modest proposal of setting up a NATO office in Tokyo, which, as I mentioned, has resurfaced, means in fact much more. According to Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer (Foreign Policy’s reporters) it is all about giving the Atlantic Alliance “its first-ever permanent footprint in the Indo-Pacific region.”
On Tuesday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went as far as to say that “Japan, [South] Korea, and Australia are all on the road to invest 2 percent of their GDP on defense, a historic step forward”, adding that “put simply, the ties between the United States, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific have never been more important or more interrelated than they are today.” The 2 per cent figure is clearly a nod to NATO’s two per cent spending target, which has always been an internal issue.
As I wrote recently, back in 1997, then senator Joe Biden was already saying that the attitudes of European NATO members pertaining to the American share of the Alliance’s costs, “seem to many senators to be variants of taking the United States for suckers” and that “unless we quickly come to a satisfactory burden sharing understanding in all its facets with our European and Canadian allies, the future of NATO in the next century will be very much in doubt.” This rhetoric finds an echo in Donald Trump points today. In other words, Sullivan is saying that the West might find allies that are more eager and ready to invest on defense in the East.
In the same page, ahead of his participation at the summit, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Reuters that “Japan is determined to strengthen its cooperation with NATO and its partners.” Along with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea (known as the “Indo-Pacific Four” – IP4), are also attending the Alliance’s meeting. Kishida also echoed NATO officials’ accusations against Beijing, by saying, without naming China, that “some countries” have been providing Moscow with dual-use civilian-military goods.
Last year, as mentioned, Macron, in an appeal to the institution’s founding treaty and to the acronym itself, described NATO, in a rather simplistic manner (his words), as “an organization of the North Atlantic Treaty.” Since the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, however, it has become increasingly clear to anyone that a “global NATO” (as Liz Truss, who was briefly the British First Minister in 2022, famously called it) has been emerging. Truss, at the time, claimed that London rejected “the false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security” in favor of “a global NATO”: “I mean that NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats.”
While there has been much talk about a “new Asian NATO” (pertaining to the QUAD or even the so-called “new QUAD”), the specter of a new (US-pushed) “global NATO”, comprising allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East still haunts global peace. This proposed “bloc” raison d’être would be – what else? – to counter the so-called “threat” of Chinese-Russian cooperation, a “threat” that is nothing but the outcome of the Alliance’s own encirclement policies against these two great powers.
The whole “pivoting east” talk is nothing new and has often been pushed by Washington – Hillary Clinton’s “Pacific Century” comes to mind, for instance. US foreign policy (in pursuit of the “American Century” and maintaining unipolarity) often resembles the swing of a pendulum. It often oscillates, in the long run, back and forth, between the idea “countering” Beijing or Moscow – and at times it might even attempt to accomplish both things simultaneously, as was the case with the incumbent American presidency and its ambitious and risky “dual containment” approach.
Such geopolitical voracity (albeit pendulous) is to face more than a few challenges. For one thing, up to very recently, very few Alliance members could even keep up with their military spending commitments (a fact which, by the way, explains much of Trump’s rhetoric against the organization). Washington itself is an increasing overextended superpower.
To sum it up, today one can see an increasingly divided NATO, which does not possess a clear view on the challenges of dual containment. With Ukraine’s fatigue lingering on, and the specter of Biden’s senility and a new Trump presidency (amid a US political crisis), the idea of pivoting east is gaining traction – however important allies within the Alliance will challenge that notion.
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since nato decided to form a global military presence and alliance in order to reestablish the unipolar dominance, it is now time for the brics+ to balance the power on our planet, they will have to start a military alliance on the frame of the success of the brics economical union, present in 4 continents. this is the only way to keep the momentum of the fair multipolar world we all are hoping for that.
sco, i believe have it in the script and are working on it. which would include india, pakistan, china and russia, who are all nuclear nations. russia and china are nuclear triad nations and india is not far behind them. nato, only the us is a nuclear triad, with aged weapons. uk is nuclear, but, leases missiles from us and only has a few, just like france, compared with russia. who has more than all the nato members combined.
india is part of the anti china axis.
what are you fussing about? india belongs to brics. buys from russia more than ever and trades with china more than ever. you seem to be brainwashed by propaganda.
fukk otan! the enemy of peace. the enemy of the world. resistance fighters of the world, unite! it is time to smash this cancer
why do ‘kiddie sniffers’ and nuclear peace campaigners end up running nato? nato hq in brussels, along with eu hq. reminds me of mark dutroux, and all the belgium mps who resigned, during his court case. where did they end up?
names of the customers of dutroux will stay a world wide secret like the customers of epstein. since not a single country is using it to expose others i guess all countries elites are among the customers of those or others.
nato go home!
need to see the end of nato and the eu. hopefully, thanks to ukraine, it will not be too long.
zionist hato needs a good russian pounding
why was the north atlantic treaty organisation set up? ironic, us is the only nation to use a certain type of wmd on civilians and they happened to choose japanese territory. why is nato still around, after the soviet union was dismantled? do believe sco will not allow nato to set foot in the east.
nato is an aliiance with one boss where everyone bends the knee infront of. sco has multiple nations who believe they are bosses. if the usa orders every nato member will send their forces. if nato attacks a member of the sco they will first think about if it is advantagous for them to let the usa destroy an own rival or weaken him until they come to help. just like china is happy russia is degraded in ukraine while china earns tons of money.
despite everything, it is the russian economy that is rising the steepest in the world. precisely because of india and china trade. so your argument is not entirely valid. brics is not a military alliance, it is an economic alliance with a non-aggression pact. brics could turn into a military union if the west puts too much pressure on it. and it does that all the time.