The inexorable drift towards an Asian Nato

The Quad, Aukus and an array of other arrangements suggest that the pieces are falling into place for such an eventuality.

Ravi Velloor
Associate Editor


(From left) Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 24, 2022.

May 26, 2022

At their London meeting in December 2019, Nato leaders asked Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to initiate forward-looking plans to make the world's premier security grouping stronger and fit for future purposes.

Over the next year, the long-serving Norwegian consulted widely and last June, at the summit in Brussels, Nato endorsed his plan, called the Nato 2030 agenda.

In essence, the agenda is about standing together to face a future marked by growing global competition, unpredictable threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks, disruptive technologies and the growing convergence in Russian and Chinese strategic thinking.

Two other elements are also key in Nato 2030. The first is that it will keep an open door policy, ready to take in new members. The second is that it will take a more global approach and forge "new engagements" in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The first has already yielded results; after Russian President Vladimir Putin allowed his insecurities to prevail over his better judgment and invaded Ukraine, frightened nations like Sweden and Finland have applied to join Nato's protective embrace, eschewing traditional neutrality. While Turkey has raised objections, no one really thinks these are insurmountable; Sweden and Finland should be in, soon.

While Nato's expansion may be taking place in Europe this isn't about that continent alone. It is only a matter of time before a similar formation, if not Nato itself, shows up in Asia.

Steadily, albeit slowly, the pieces are falling into place for such an eventuality.

The quad quickens

In 2018, after the Quad - short for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue - was revived, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was dismissive, predicting that it would dissipate "like ocean foam". Today, no one doubts that the group, which gathers the US with Japan, Australia and India, is a serious emerging player - one that could even possibly be expanded to include countries such as South Korea.

Quad members certainly have kept a frenetic pace. There are weekly meetings at various levels and frequently, it issues joint statements outlining common positions. Quad navies have conducted war games together under the label of the annual Exercise Malabar.

Last September, their intelligence leaders assembled in a Quadrilateral Strategic Intelligence Forum, and their senior cyber security figures met in Australia earlier this year. Things are moving. At this week's Tokyo summit, the four launched a significant new effort called Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA).

IPMDA is touted as an effort to build a faster, wider, and more accurate maritime picture of near-real-time activities in partners' waters and will integrate three critical regions - the Pacific Islands, South-east Asia, and the Indian Ocean region - in the Indo-Pacific.

Aside from tracking of "dark shipping" - when vessels switch off their transponders - and other tactical-level activities, it is meant to improve partners' ability to protect their fisheries.

The last point, fisheries, may look innocuous but not when you consider China's accelerating demand for quality nutrition to feed its increasingly wealthy population that is pushing it to send out its trawlers all the way to South America. IPMDA will help keep a check.

Add energy supplies to nourishment as another element of national security and you can see where China's vulnerabilities are being probed.

From the Sunda Straits in the southern Indian Ocean to the Malacca Strait and the India-controlled parts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, half of China's energy supplies are vulnerable to disruption from potentially hostile security arrangements.

Now, developments further north add complications. Aware of its vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean, China has increasingly committed its energy security to Russia through cross-border pipelines as well as tankers that ply the steadily busier Northern Sea Route, or Arctic passage.

Finland and Sweden's likely entry into Nato - each with superbly trained Arctic forces - complicates Russia's dominance of the High North, one that Moscow has indicated it is willing to share with China, and adds to factors that Beijing needs to worry about.

As Mr Biden said: "Quad is not a passing fad. We mean business."

There are other side plays that could add up - capillaries that could feed into arterial formations such as Quad and Aukus - and possibly, bigger things.

The US and India are now bound by a raft of security agreements. Japan and Australia recently concluded a reciprocal access agreement that allows the two countries to station troops on each other's soil.

In South Korea, US troop presence, currently reckoned at about 28,000, is slated to rise. A joint statement after President Biden's visit to Seoul this month stated that the leaders of both countries agreed "to initiate discussions to expand the scope and scale of combined military exercises and training on and around the Korean Peninsula".

Chinese officials have always privately maintained that the US has no real interest in settling the conflict on the Korean Peninsula - technically still on a war footing since the 1953 Korean War - because it needs an excuse to station strategic weapons on China's periphery.

Garuda shield war games

Closer home, come August, the US and Indonesia are likely to hold their Garuda Shield joint war games in the Natuna Islands, where Indonesia's Exclusive Economic Zone partly overlaps Chinese claims in the South China Sea.

Jakarta has stepped up efforts to counter Chinese fishing boats and government vessels spotted near the islands ever since an incident some years ago when a Chinese coast guard ship intervened to seize back a Chinese vessel caught poaching by the Indonesian authorities.

This year's Garuda Shield will reportedly involve more than a dozen countries, including America's Aukus partners Australia and Britain, as well as Japan's Ground Self-Defence Force.

While the above developments have unmistakable strategic significance in the larger context of a US-led, or US-inspired China containment policy, sometimes the advances and acceptability of US strategic thinking can be barely perceptible, or look merely semantic.

Take the concept of Indo-Pacific, a US contrivance meant to downplay China's weight and influence in the Asia-Pacific, and at the same time, play to Indian aspirations of being an equal power to China.

Several Asean states were discomfited by the terminology when it was first promoted and some, to this day, would rather refer to the region by its traditional name, Asia-Pacific.

Three years ago, Asean members agonised over what to call the Indonesia-sponsored Asean vision for the Hollywood-to-Bollywood region marked out by the US as "Indo-Pacific". Should it be "Asia- Indo-Pacific", "Indo-Asia-Pacific", or simply "Indo-Pacific"?

Ultimately, the name of the document was settled as Asean Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. In other words, "Indo-Pacific" held.

Interest in IPEF

This week, when the Biden administration's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework was revealed, no less than seven of the 10 Asean states were in, even if some did so for form's sake and to not displease the United States.

To be sure, not everything is pointing in the same direction. For instance, it has been noted that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) has nothing on tariff reductions, an issue critical to most trading nations. As well, political differences were on display; significantly, the US and India continued to differ on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, preventing condemnation of Moscow in the Quad joint statement.

While there is plenty to scoff about IPEF - China's Global Times called it "loud but empty" and unlikely to go far - that assessment could be premature. The framework revolves around four pillars - supply chain resilience, infrastructure and clean energy, tax and anti-corruption, and trade. Indeed, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, once so disdainful of Quad, has suggested that IPEF could lead to "economic decoupling, technological blockade, industrial chain disruption, and aggravating the supply chain crisis".

And even on the matter of the seeming disagreement over Russia, which is generally attributed to heavy Indian dependence on Russian military equipment, a deeper issue is missed.

New Delhi hasn't given up hope of convincing Washington to drop its reflexively anti-Moscow line, and take a softer approach, in order to stop Russia from diving deeper into Beijing's strategic embrace.

French President Emmanuel Macron has a near-parallel view. Earlier this month, he said in words that would no doubt have thrilled Mr Putin that it would probably take decades for Ukraine to join the European Union, and that Russia should "not be humiliated" in any eventual settlement.

For now, such advice is possibly wasted. The US is clear that it wants to see nothing less than a militarily emaciated Russia and as for the Russia-China nexus, its assessment is that things have gone too far to be reversed.

It may be right. Russia and China provided proof of that tight relationship when Mr Biden and other Quad leaders were in Tokyo, flying their strategic bombers near Japan in a joint exercise. In response, both Japan and South Korea scrambled jets - suggesting how the chips may fall in a future conflict.

What of Nato itself and a likely future for it in Asia? Last month, Nato members agreed to increase "practical and political cooperation" with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea in response to China's failure to condemn Russia's war in Ukraine. Foreign ministers of the four have been invited to attend a Nato meeting in Madrid next month, just as they did in December 2020 for the first time.

South Korea's state intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Service, just revealed that it has joined the Nato Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence as a "contributing participant" - the first Asian member.

"We are building stronger ties between Nato and our Asia-Pacific partners, starting with Japan," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month at a Nato meeting in Brussels. "We also had South Korea; we had Australia and New Zealand here today. And this is something that will carry through to the summit in Madrid, building greater coherence, greater collaboration, greater cooperation between Europe and Asia, between Nato and Asia-Pacific partners."

The Madrid meeting will also discuss Nato's updated "Strategic Concept". Nato Secretary-General Stoltenberg has said it needs to address "the security consequences of a much stronger China".

Former Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa, a widely respected figure in Asean, recently referred to suggestions of an Indo-Pacific Nato as a "non-starter for the region".

Whether he proves accurate, or not, remains to be seen. Without question, the instinct of every Asean member is to steer clear of the coming Big Power clash, as they must.

But then again, they would be facing an increasingly humourless America that is more and more inclined to accept the Eldridge Cleaver dictum that there is no more neutrality in the world - "You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem".

There are no easy choices.

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