NATO members are reviving the idea of putting an office in Tokyo to give the alliance its first-ever permanent footprint in the Indo-Pacific region.
“We have to move forward with a liaison office in Tokyo,” Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias c told Foreign Policy in an interview. “I think it stands to reason that if you want your partners to be concerned with your problems, you have to be concerned with their problems.”
NATO first floated the idea of an Indo-Pacific office last year, at the urging of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who has already set up a China team at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. But the move was shot down at the time by French President Emmanuel Macron, who openly worried that putting a NATO office in China’s backyard would raise tensions with Beijing.
The debate over whether NATO should create new footprints in the Indo-Pacific comes as Washington and its allies grapple with how NATO should respond to the perceived growing threat from China, which doesn’t fit neatly into the alliance’s historic core missions.
Yet some alliance officials, including Stoltenberg and top U.S. officials, are pushing NATO to expand its conversations on China. China remains a top investment partner of Europe, but its more assertive regional posture under President Xi Jinping has unnerved many European leaders, and Beijing’s indirect support of Russia amid its war in Ukraine has further isolated China politically across the continent.
“I think we have been too naive on Russia, too naive on China,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday.
Key U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, meanwhile, including both Japan and South Korea, have doubled down on support for Ukraine and expanded their own defense spending with an eye toward boosting cooperation with Europe.
“Japan, [South] Korea, and Australia are all on the road to invest 2 percent of their GDP on defense, a historic step forward,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. “Put simply, the ties between the United States, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific have never been more important or more interrelated than they are today.”
China has appeared in two straight NATO summit communiqués—and is likely to show up in the text that follows the Washington summit, too. The idea of putting a NATO office in Tokyo is not on the agenda at this week’s gathering—which includes four Indo-Pacific nations as guests—but Billstrom said allies are likely to bring it up with France again soon. Two other NATO officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the move.
The office isn’t seen as a game-changer for foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, but it would give NATO a toehold in a region that it has historically avoided but has become more strategically important, because of both China’s saber-rattling and its and North Korea’s support of Russia. But the impetus for the office is coming from within NATO—not from the Indo-Pacific.
“It’s not something anyone is pursuing at present,” said one Indo-Pacific nation diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about ongoing policy debates. “China’s demonstration [that] it is committed to reconstituting the Russian military-industrial base and supporting their war on Ukraine has been sufficient to demonstrate that the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic theaters are irrevocably linked and that the security challenges we are facing are not defined by geographic theaters. So no need for the tokenism of an office in Tokyo.”
The French position—as usual—is complicated. “I am not sure Macron will move,” said Camille Grand, a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and former NATO assistant secretary-general. “The French have identified this rather small issue of the Tokyo office as the symbol of their reluctance to see a bigger role for NATO in Asia.”
Yet the French probably see a bigger role for NATO in Asia, and Macron has taken a much more hawkish turn against Russia in recent months as he portrays the Ukrainian conflict as existential for Europe’s security. “This does not mean that they fundamentally disagree that NATO should not pay more attention to China,” Grand said.
Billstrom batted down the notion that NATO planting a flag in the Indo-Pacific would be a provocative signal to China. “Putting up a liaison office is not the same as putting a major naval base or a major military airfield in position,” he said. “This is a question of showing the political interest [in the region].”
There has been greater military alignment within NATO over maritime deployments to the Indo-Pacific, including between British and French aircraft carriers scheduled to ship out in the next two to three years. Germany, Spain, and France will also send out a force of a dozen fighter aircraft and supporting planes on a tour of the Indo-Pacific; Italy and Germany will send two large ships to the U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific exercise, which is taking place through the end of August. Russia has recently countered with its own exercises near Hawaii.
“The question of security in the Euro-Atlantic region and Indo-Pacific are not just closely interlinked—they are two sides of the same coin,” Billstrom said.
Top officials from three Indo-Pacific nations—Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea—are in attendance at the NATO summit in Washington this week as official guests. (Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was also invited but opted to skip the summit.) North Korea’s support to Russia in its war in Ukraine is an agenda topic, too. Billstrom said NATO should also reach out to countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, which “all, for various reasons, feel the breath of China down their necks.”
But former U.S. President Donald Trump’s acolytes have pushed for the United States to focus more on the Indo-Pacific—and have brushed aside the idea that European powers can have an impact in the region. “With respect, I don’t think what the foreign minister of Estonia says about Taiwan is going to matter much to China,” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump administration Pentagon official who now heads up the Marathon Initiative, said at a Foreign Policy event on Monday.
And some experts believe that European shows of force in the Indo-Pacific are masking the reality that within NATO’s military command structure, no one is seriously considering that European powers will get militarily involved in the Indo-Pacific.
“There’s no real focus on Asia, no one talking about Asia at those commands in any real way,” said Ian Bowers, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. “The real reality is there is no consensus on Europe when it comes to China. And that is magnified when it comes to the security sphere.”
Billstrom said the United States is looking for political support—not boots on the ground—to help handle China’s threats in the Indo-Pacific.
“The big question actually for NATO is: What can NATO do if the U.S. becomes involved in a contingency in Asia where those enablers that the U.S. provides suddenly get dragged over to the wrong side of the world for NATO?” said Bowers, using a military term to describe U.S. elements that help support European combat forces. “And what happens then? I think NATO has not figured that out in any way, shape, or form.”
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