Western allies are probing a series of potential avenues to partner with Asian and Pacific nations to manage potential threats from China, according to Western officials and analysts.
“There’s sort of a full-court press to try and get a lot of those key countries on the same page,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said.
American officials have had uneven success in rallying European allies to adopt hawkish positions on China, which has gained global influence by building strong economic relationships around the world. Still, there is growing interest in a wide-ranging democratic coalition to restrain Beijing’s aggression, a trend revealed most explicitly Monday by NATO’s civilian leader.
“We need to work even more closely with like-minded countries — like Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea — to defend the global rules and institutions that have kept us safe for decades,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday. “And ultimately, to stand up for a world built on freedom and democracy, not on bullying and coercion.”
Stoltenberg invoked the Asian and Pacific countries while warning of “the security consequences” of China’s emergence as a global heavyweight. And while he took care to say that the alliance “does not see China as a new enemy or adversary,” the repeated warnings about Beijing struck U.S. and allied observers as a clear window into how Western powers view the communist rival.
“I think it’s big — having in mind Stoltenberg’s character, he’s extremely diplomatic and extremely careful,” a central European official said. “China is a bigger and bigger threat. Internal discussions are pretty straightforward about China’s malign activities and the risk that China poses.”
Cooper agreed. “Any time you have the secretary-general talking about really working closely with Asian countries, that is a little bit of a shift,” he said, noting NATO’s traditional focus on Europe. “The fact that NATO is talking more openly about engaging in key Asian countries is definitely important, and it is a bit of a change.”
Stoltenberg, who launched a so-called reflection period to ensure that the NATO allies “remain ready today to tackle the challenges of tomorrow,” emphasized that the allies need to “be more united politically” in addition to their traditional military cooperation.
“The challenges that we face over the next decade are greater than any of us can tackle alone,” he said during a broadcast with the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantic Council. “Neither Europe alone. Nor America alone.”
That’s a thinly veiled reference to the sometimes-acrimonious relationship between President Trump’s administration and the leaders in key European capitals. Yet his call for political unity dovetails with other initiatives to forge tighter links between the NATO allies and the Asian and Pacific democracies on the front lines of China’s rise.
The Five Eyes — an intelligence-sharing bloc that includes the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand — reportedly has agreed to tighten economic relations in addition to the traditional national security cooperation. And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, just months after disappointing Trump’s team with his tolerance for Huawei’s involvement in the U.K.’s 5G network, now wants to partner with India, South Korea, and other democratic countries to crowd the Beijing-backed tech giants out of the market.
“What we’re seeing is the beginning of an effort to tie together not just NATO and Japan — which is effectively what the G-7 is,” Cooper said, referring to the forum for the seven largest industrialized democracies, “but a broader coalition of democracies that can work together.”
Such improved coordination will be essential to bracketing any threats from a Chinese Communist Party that controls the resources of a fast-growing economy in a country of 1.4 billion people.
“Soon, China will have the biggest economy in the world,” Stoltenberg said. “They are leading and investing in a lot of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence,” he said. “We cannot manage this alone. We have to do this together.”
