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References to China in the communique of NATO’s latest summit are a reminder of debates in Asia about similar alliance arrangements.

NATO’s identification of China as a ‘systemic challenge’ has raised some eyebrows in Southeast Asia. Some Asians wonder why NATO should be meddling in Asian affairs when its ambit is Europe. However, Beijing's increasingly assertive actions – in building a nuclear arsenal and space and cyber warfare capabilities, and in developing its entente cordiale with Russia – appear to give NATO a legitimate interest in Asian affairs. Indeed, the transatlantic alliance’s interest could be a source of inspiration for regional security structures in Asia.

NATO is Interested in Asia Because China is Interested in Europe

The NATO communique issued last month noted that China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour raise questions on the rules-based international order and impinge on areas relevant to Alliance security, not least because China’s military cooperation with Russia includes participation in Russian exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area. The recent extension of a friendship and cooperation treaty between them underscores the destabilising reconfiguration of power relations among the US, Russia and China.

While the interests of Russia and China overlap, they do not collide: Moscow largely defers to Beijing in East Asia and Beijing accepts Moscow’s pre-eminent role in post-Soviet Europe and the Middle East. That convergence reflects the great-power logic of Eurasia’s possible, if not probable, division into allied Russian and Chinese spheres of influence.

Either way, prospects of a Sino-Russian axis are turning NATO’s attention to China. A revisionist alliance between Moscow and Beijing would threaten the global balance of power that is underwritten to a defining extent by the Euro-US military status quo embodied in NATO.

Such an alliance recalls the UK’s concerns, inherited from Halford Mackinder, over the formation of a hostile Eurasian heartland, the geographical pivot of world history that survives periodic readjustments in inter-state relations. Students of history would also invoke George F Kennan’s argument that there are five centres of industrial and military power that are crucial to the national security of the US: the US itself; the UK; Germany and Central Europe; the Soviet Union; and Japan.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative would connect the chief factory of the world with a global hinterland that runs through Eurasia to the industrial heartland of Europe (including Germany, France, Italy and the UK) and resource-rich Africa, and extend to the US as well. The land, sea and digital connectivity envisaged in China’s Silk Road strategy would recreate Mackinder’s Eurasia, revive Kennanite fears of global centres of industrial and military power falling into hostile hands, and provide the material basis for an ideological rebuff to the Western liberal imprint on the rules-based international order.

If Asia ‘goes’ to Europe, should Europe not ‘come’ to Asia? NATO would be the vehicle.

Asian NATO?

In Asia, a tacit alliance between Russia and China would reverse the gains produced by the San Francisco system of the early 1950s, which initiated economic, political and military commitments between the US and its Pacific allies to prevent Asia’s military-industrial potential from falling into contrarian hands. This system protected Japan from the Soviet Union and China, but enmeshed it in a network of hub-and-spoke relationships centred in the US that sealed off Taiwan, South Korea and Southeast Asia from the reassertion of Japanese militarism likely to be produced by its post-Second World War economic heft. The US’s position as Asia’s offshore balancer resulted from the contemporary success of the San Francisco system.

Mackinder and Kennan’s world is under pressure from China’s military advances in the South China Sea. Irreversible short of war, its fait accompli advances feed into a larger Eurasian challenge to NATO’s status as the default provider of security in Europe.

It is difficult to envisage a North Atlantic military bloc expanding to include the Western Pacific, but NATO could be replicated in Asia. The Indo-Pacific holds the key to an Asian NATO. The region is a US configuration, stretching from its western shores to the west coast of India. It also integrates the hinterlands of the Pacific and Indian oceans, unlike the earlier strategic notion of the Asia-Pacific, which only refers to those parts of Asia that lie contiguous to the Pacific Ocean. The bi-oceanic policy of the US is a response to China’s success in breaking through the three-island-chain strategy designed to contain Russian and Chinese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific during the Cold War. Prospective fourth and fifth island chains emerging between South Asia and Africa draw attention to the enhanced strategic role of the Indian Ocean, which is marked by China’s access to Hambantota in Sri Lanka, dual-use Gwadar in Pakistan and its base in Djibouti.

India’s investment in its first foreign port venture in Iran’s Chabahar, a facility that lies on the Makran coast of the Arabian Sea and opens on to the Gulf of Oman, confronts China’s ‘string-of-pearls’ strategy in the Indian Ocean. India is a part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) with the US, Australia and Japan. The QUAD could provide the template for the eventual formation of an Asian NATO because of the strong overlap of strategic interests among its members. Australia and Japan are treaty allies of the US and, although India is not, China’s seemingly unstoppable maritime advances remind India of the need to exercise its countervailing power in the Indian Ocean.

An institutional declaration of strategic identity through an Asian NATO could follow, depending on how it would be conceptualised, structured and executed. However, it would have to incorporate the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is no stranger to the fate of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organisation, founded in 1954 and 1959 respectively. The Sino-Soviet split, the Sino-US rapprochement, global detente and divergent national interests undermined both organisations, which were dissolved long before the end of the Cold War. Today, Southeast Asian states would be wary of joining any organisation that could be held hostage to the vagaries of great power relationships beyond their control. The emergence of an Asian NATO would fracture ASEAN along continental and maritime lines, with a ‘Sinicised’ continental region being hostile to an ‘Americanised’ maritime sphere.

However, great power dynamics lie outside the Southeast Asian grasp even without the appearance of an Asian NATO. China’s rise, too, could split ASEAN by placing Indochina, which lies at the heart of continental Southeast Asia, on an externally imported collision course with the maritime states. The alignments of Cambodia and Laos with China are apparent already. Vietnam’s ultimate choice would make all the difference to the future of ASEAN.

Should the Sino-Russian entente develop into a formal alliance opposing NATO and its transatlantic provenance and roots, a Pacific version of NATO would provide the possibility of resisting regional hegemony.

Wary of war, as most people are, Asians would hope that an Asian NATO would not need to be formed. Neither should a Sino-Russian alliance, however.

Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times, Singapore.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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