The NATO Washington Summit and the Indo-Pacific

NATO’s engagement with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand—known as the Indo-Pacific 4 (IP4)—began to flourish after 9/11 with coordination on counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and on counter-piracy missions in the Indian Ocean. In the early 2010s, NATO signed formal partnership agreements with the IP4. The alliance’s first convening with the group took place in 2016 and focused on shared concerns about North Korea’s developing nuclear and conventional military capabilities. The NATO-IP4 partnership was elevated with the inaugural participation of the leaders of the four Indo-Pacific countries in the alliance’s 2022 Madrid summit and its Vilnius summit the following year. The groups’ third meeting will take place at NATO’s 75th anniversary gathering in Washington, DC. 

Numerous common interests spur NATO and the IP4 to strengthen collaboration. They are all democracies that value protecting human rights and individual freedoms; they seek to bolster the rules-based international order; they are concerned with global challenges such as cyber defense, terrorism, climate change, and maritime security; and they increasingly recognize that security developments in the Euro-Atlantic area (including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and in the Indo-Pacific (including China’s growing military capabilities and destabilizing behavior in the South and East China seas and the Taiwan Strait) have implications that reverberate beyond these regions.

Contrary to warnings by China and Russia that NATO is poised to expand to the east and establish a presence in the Indo-Pacific, no such plan is afoot. The IP4 countries could not join the alliance even if they wanted to since the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949, restricts the addition of new members to European states. Moreover, NATO does not seek to establish a presence outside of the North Atlantic area. Rather, the IP4 and NATO countries want to understand each other’s threat perceptions and learn from each other’s experiences. They have all come to realize that the connections between the Euro-Atlantic area and the Indo-Pacific make developments in one region more consequential for security in the other than ever before. 

The upcoming NATO summit provides an opportunity to deepen consultations and coordination between NATO and the IP4 countries in ways that bring national and regional benefits. Potential topics to compare notes on include China-Russia relations, global nuclear dynamics, foreign information manipulation and interference, linkages between deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic area and the Indo-Pacific, the ongoing war in Ukraine, evolving challenges posed by China, and economic security and hybrid threats.