Opinion
Lavina Lee
International relations expert
Last week, Paul Keating labelled NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg a “supreme fool” and stridently criticised NATO’s “lurch eastward” with its proposed opening of a liaison office in Tokyo.
In the former Australian prime minister’s view, NATO has no business in Asia, and he firmly rejected any parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s coercion of Taiwan and belligerence in the South China Sea. China, said Keating, had “no record of attacking other states, unlike the United States”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Vilnius, Lithuania, last Wednesday,Credit: AP/Pavel Golovkin
Keating was praised by China’s Global Times, which described him “a visionary and insightful politician”. NATO leaders and the four Asian democracies attending the NATO Summit – Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia – took a different view.
In Vilnius, participants agreed that what happens in the Indo-Pacific matters for Europe and therefore for NATO. And what happens in Europe matters for the Indo-Pacific. This reaffirms the consensus that liberal democracies face a global threat from an axis of revisionist authoritarian countries and that they can only achieve greater security in their own regions if they are willing to stand together.
Democracies standing together is exactly what revisionist autocracies such as Russia, China, Iran, Syria and North Korea do not want. As these nations work ever closer to undermine and weaken the unity of the United States and its allies, they seek to simultaneously exercise and enhance their leverage over these same countries, including Australia.
In particular, a key pillar of Chinese grand strategy is to divide the US from allies in Asia and Europe. Putin was doing the same with important European states such as Germany and France before his ill-considered invasion of Ukraine achieved precisely the opposite.
This gets to the significance of last week’s NATO Summit for Asia. It is not so much that NATO members will soon agree to formally include Asia in a global collective security agreement where an attack against one member is considered an attack against all members. This will not happen in the foreseeable future. It is more that events in Vilnius last week represent the failure of the revisionist authoritarian states – China most of all – to divide the democracies.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was right to attend the NATO summit, and he was right to declare Stoltenberg a “friend of Australia” – a clear rebuke to Keating.
The Russian threat to NATO and the question of Ukrainian accession to NATO remained the dominant topics of discussion, yet the Vilnius Summit Communique also contained a greatly expanded focus on China, describing it as a “systemic challenge” to Euro-Atlantic security. It specified that “the People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values”.
It went on to criticise China for “malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation” and charged Beijing with striving “to subvert the rules-based international order, including in space, cyber and maritime domains”. This represents a significant hardening of position on China.
The importance of this is that while NATO represents the hawkish end of European military and strategic thinking and is usually ahead of thinking within the European Union, the latter usually catches up. NATO essentially tills the ground for the EU until reality finally hits it in the face.
France’s opposition to the NATO liaison office idea has put it on the backburner for now. The reality that conflict in the Taiwan Strait would have calamitous effects on the economic fortunes of Europe makes it an idea that will eventually stick.
In turn, the growing consensus on Russia and China between NATO and developed democracies in Asia – particularly Japan, South Korea and Australia – opens the way for greater collaboration and co-ordination on how to counter the malicious activities of both of these countries in so-called peacetime. The aim would be to reduce the likelihood of developed countries in Europe or Asia being weak links to be exploited or militarily and economically coerced.
This, then, is where things stand. We are not about to see the presence of British or French naval vessels in Asia that could alter the balance of power. There will not be meaningful numbers of European troops stationed in North-East Asia. But the Chinese realisation that European nations will not turn a blind eye to any Chinese use of force in Taiwan or elsewhere is noteworthy.
Beijing cannot afford to alienate the advanced democracies in Europe. It still needs their markets, finance, technology and know-how. That NATO, and gradually the EU, are framing the challenge as a Chinese and Russian-led band of authoritarian states seeking to coerce and eventually eclipse the democracies is an enormous problem for Beijing.
Bear in mind that Europeans do not speak as urgently about deterring China as Americans or Japanese or Australians tend to do, but the summit shows that Europe is beginning to think on similar terms. We don’t know what NATO or individual European countries would do in the event of a Taiwan crisis. Neither does China. But the Chinese will now know that Europe will not remain indifferent to such a scenario as Beijing once hoped.
No-one predicted how strongly Europe has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And given deterrence is not merely military, the greater China’s uncertainty about the unintended consequences of using force, the better.
China wins if it can divide and conquer. Perhaps Keating missed the import of what occurred last week, but Xi Jinping did not, judging by the efforts of his officials to condemn any footprint for NATO in Asia. This made it a good week for liberal democracies.
Dr Lavina Lee is a senior lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University.
