Asia Whole and Free? Assessing the Viability and Practicality of a Pacific NATO

Executive Summary

Managing China’s resurgence will be the fundamental challenge for America’s next generation of foreign policy leaders. Since Chairman Deng Xiaoping began introducing market reforms in 1978, China’s GDP has grown from $219 billion to $13.6 trillion, lifting nearly 800 million Chinese out of poverty and transforming China into a global peer of the United States. With this newfound power have come opportunities for cooperation, like President Barack Obama’s climate negotiations with Chairman Xi Jinping that paved the way for the Paris Climate Accord, and competition, like President Donald Trump’s trade war and attempts by both sides to blame the other for the coronavirus pandemic. Neither president’s approach to China has been one of universal partnership or conflict; rather, each has chosen to occupy a different position on the collaboration-competition spectrum on a suite of issues ranging from military posture and regional diplomacy to economic policy and technology development. As China escalates its military aggression in the South China Sea and diplomatic efforts across the globe, policy leaders are beginning to debate whether a military alliance like NATO would be an appropriate tool to balance China’s growing ambition and clout in the Indo-Pacific.

This report will address four questions in the Pacific NATO debate. First, is there a historical precedent for a Pacific NATO? This report does find a precedent in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), though it was largely unsuccessful due to its lack of regional adoption, weak mutual defense provisions, and ultimately became tainted by the Vietnam War. Second, would such an alliance be necessary given the plethora of existing multilateral partnerships in the region? While there is a broad multilateral landscape in the Indo-Pacific, there is currently no agreement that combines both the wide reach and deep obligations of a hypothetical Pacific NATO. However, the Quad and RIMPAC do bring together many of the key Indo-Pacific powers and serve as an important foundation for U.S.-oriented multilateral regional security. Third, how could such an alliance be structured? This report examines three options: expanding NATO’s mandate beyond Europe, building on its Enhanced Opportunity Partner (EOP) program, and creating a new alliance system. It also uses the case of Montenegro’s NATO accession to generate a broad set of criteria for future membership. And fourth, how would Indo-Pacific nations, including China, respond to such an alliance? This would be exceedingly difficult. China has significant economic leverage over even our closest allies, like Australia and Japan. Intractable internal disputes abound, particularly between South Korea and Japan and four nations—Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—with competing claims in the South China Sea. Two of the United States’ most important partners in the region, India and Singapore, have a longstanding aversion to exactly this type of alliance system. And for newer partners, like Malaysia and Indonesia, the value proposition is even less clear. The Chinese are likely to respond to any attempts at a multilateral military alliance in its backyard with a whole-of-government effort to stop it. If that alliance includes Taiwan, it could result in even more aggressive action.

Finally, this report considers whether a Pacific NATO is an appropriate policy tool given the broader scope of U.S.-China relations. In addition to military competition, the United States and China are also engaged in critical technological, economic, and cultural competition around the world. Rather than make a Pacific NATO the cornerstone of that competition, this report argues that a more practical and effective approach would be to build on existing constructs like the Quad or the NATO EOP program while revitalizing economic efforts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

Introduction: National Interests and Thucydides’ Trap

Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Sandy Winnefeld, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, and former National Security Council Advisor Samantha Vinograd argue that the United States’ principal national interests are, in order:

 

The development of a multipolar world led by the United States and China undoubtedly impacts the global economic system, the security and confidence of our allies, and the standing of freedom and human rights on the word stage. Yet it also has the potential to affect the United States’ other core interests. Thucydides famously argued that man’s three strongest motives are fear, honor, and self-interest. China’s greatest fear is an internal uprising that threatens the Communist Party’s control of the country; everything from the Party’s blistering economic growth targets to its unprecedented detention of more than one million ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province can be viewed through this lens. Nowhere is China’s commitment to honor more palpable than the issue of Taiwan; it views the reintegration of Taiwan as a matter of inalienable territorial sovereignty and an existential priority. Today, we see China’s self-interest most clearly expressed in its more aggressive posture in the South China Sea and its sweeping Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aim to dramatically expand China’s influence in its immediate neighborhood and the Eastern Hemisphere writ large.

Each of these has the potential to bring China into conflict with the United States. Harvard professor Graham Allison argues in his 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? that the U.S.-China competition for global dominance is highly likely to result in armed conflict. 12 of the 16 cases since 1500 in which a rising power threatened to surpass an established hegemon ended in war, and the most common path to war was a third party conflict that eventually drew in larger neighboring powers. It is easy to see how, given the United States’ ambiguous military commitments to the island, Taiwan could end up playing such a role in a future conflict with China. And it is also highly plausible that a sweeping alliance such as a Pacific NATO would increase the likelihood of such a conflict drawing in many other regional powers.

Stanford historian Niall Ferguson is less confident that China’s rise will lead to armed conflict. Instead, he argues that the United States and China are much more likely to end up in a second Cold War—and that this ‘Cold War II’ is already well underway.

Ferguson sees Cold War II unfolding along six fronts: trade, technology, currency, capital, military, and cultural competition. The trade competition has been most visible over the last two years, as the Trump administration has led the United States into a trade war in order to reduce its trade deficit with China. Ferguson argues the technology competition is most important, as China is now threatening decades of American dominance in space and cybersecurity while racing to beat the United States to new frontiers in artificial intelligence, 5G network deployment, and quantum computing. The United States’ goal, as Ferguson sees it, should be to prevent China from reaching its explicit goal of technology parity. The currency competition, Ferguson argues, is at worst second priority to technology; the United States benefits enormously from the U.S. dollar’s global dominance, and China has a massive incentive to challenge that dominance. The capital competition is of particular importance to China, as it requires significant foreign direct investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is actively examining ways to curtail Chinese investment in the United States. The cultural competition, perhaps the most sweeping, is also the most intractable: many Chinese interests and values are simply at odds with those of the United States. And as the two countries interact in closer proximity with ever rising stakes in every corner of the globe, those value and ideological contradictions are likely to become an increasingly important part of U.S.-China competition. This view is shared by General David Petraeus, who similarly divides U.S.-China competition into economic, military, diplomatic, technological, and ideological realms (Petraeus and Caruso, 2019).

The military competition, while the focus of this report, is just one aspect of a broader, generation-defining competition. Chinese revanchism in the South China Sea threatens longtime allies and partners in the region, prompting increased U.S. freedom of navigation operations under the philosophy that “the cornerstone of America’s defense is deterrence” (Carter 2018). Elsewhere in the region, China threatens U.S. allies with territorial disputes in the East China Sea and predatory economics across South and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, China continues to serve as a lifeline to one of the world’s most dangerous rogue states.

Could a Pacific NATO help address these challenges? The United States has been a Pacific country for 200 years, and a Pacific power for half that time. Yet we are thousands of miles removed from the heart of the Asia Pacific region, which is why alliances and forward operating bases have been at the heart of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy for decades. A Pacific alliance network similar to NATO was part of the United States’ original containment strategy, and was even supported publicly by then-Vice President Richard Nixon after returning from a 1953 tour of South and Southeast Asia. According to former U.S. Ambassadors to NATO Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute, the core components of NATO’s success are its mutual defense provisions, strong U.S. leadership, and a shared set of democratic values among member states. The rest of this report will consider that historical context, and whether a Pacific NATO could realistically replicate the successes—and avoid the shortcomings—of its European counterpart.

 

History

In April 1950, President Truman’s National Security Council study group presented him with a grim view of the world. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an existential contest between “slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin” and “free society [that] values the individual as an end in himself.” The Soviet Union, they argued, was a “slave state” whose implacable purpose was to “eliminate the challenge of freedom” (NSC 68, 1950).This placed the United States and the Soviet Union at opposite poles of global ideological and psychological struggle. And it was up to the United States to win that struggle by stopping Communism wherever it sought a foothold.

As the containment policy became enshrined U.S. doctrine during the Truman administration, policymakers like Secretary of State Dean Acheson, diplomats George Kennan and Averell Harriman, and State Department Director of Policy Planning Paul Nitze realized that the objectives to “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world” would be impossible to achieve alone (Kennan, 1947). The United States would therefore need to “strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the non-Soviet nations; and help such of those nations as are able and willing to make an important contribution to U.S. security, to increase their economic and political stability and their military capability” (NSC 68, 1950). In other words, the United States would need a system of alliances.

This assessment, known as NSC 68, identified four priority areas outside the United States where the conflict would be fought: Western Europe (the ‘First Front’), the Western Pacific (the ‘Second Front’), the Near and Middle East (‘the Third Front’), and Africa. Their vision was to build a set of military alliances to protect at least three of these fronts, building on the momentum from the previous year’s easy 82-13 passage of the North Atlantic Treaty—the United States’ first formal military alliance since 1800. The outbreak of the Korean War two months after NSC 68’s publication eventually split the Western Pacific into North Asia (still the ‘Second Front’) and Southeast Asia (now the ‘Fourth Front’). It is important to note, however, that commitment to Asia was not unanimous. Kennan, for example, believed that the Soviets’ relative inactivity in the region meant it did not merit significant U.S. attention; instead, he advocated for a perimeter defense and “terminat[ing] our involvements on the mainland of Asia as rapidly as possible and on the best terms we can get” (Heer, 2018).

NSC 68’s vision for Second and Third Front alliances ultimately informed the creation of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), respectively. However, President Eisenhower did not merely seek to replicate NATO in new theaters. Eisenhower saw NATO as deeply flawed; he felt that stationing U.S. forces in Western Europe under NATO’s imprimatur would make it virtually possible to remove them so long as the Soviet Union posed a threat, and worried that a similar arrangement in Asia or the Middle East would lead to unsustainable U.S. troop commitments. Today we view the decision to exclude permanent forces under unified military command as one of the principal causes of SEATO and CENTO’s failure. But at the time, this was seen as a significant improvement.

 

SEATO

In the initial aftermath of World War II, the United States was content to contain its focus in Southeast Asia to the newly independent Philippines, and let the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands serve as the primary security partners for their remaining colonies. However, European foot-dragging on independence, the First Indochina War, and especially the 1949 fall of China dramatically increased Southeast Asia’s importance to U.S. policymakers. “The establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the success of the communist-dominated Viet Minh against the French in the First Indochina War saw Southeast Asia rapidly assume its place alongside Europe, the Middle East and North Asia as a frontline region of the Cold War,” argues New Zealand historian Damien Fenton:

Although the First Indochina War was brought to an end via a negotiated settlement… in the form of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the United States remained deeply skeptical that such a settlement could be relied upon to deliver long-term geopolitical stability to Southeast Asia. Instead, the United States championed the establishment of a western-backed regional defense framework—SEATO—not to replace, but to work in parallel to, the Geneva Accords in shoring up the ‘Fourth Front’ of the Cold War (Fenton, 2012).

The United States, particularly Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, doubted that the continued French military presence allowed for by the Geneva Accords was sufficient to protect the newly independent South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from communist aggression. Dulles was convinced that further losses in Southeast Asia were inevitable unless the United States could establish a U.S.-led a regional defense alliance.

With this in mind, Dulles convened eight nations—Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—in Manila to sign the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty in September 1954, a mere six weeks after the Geneva Accords. The treaty, also known as the Manila Pact, sought to deter communist aggression by binding the region together through mutual defense, just as the North Atlantic Treaty had done for Europe. However, three key shortcomings ultimately doomed SEATO. The first two were structural flaws present from the outset, while the third was largely driven by evolving U.S. policy in the region.

When NATO was founded in 1949, it included 12 nations: ten of them in Europe, and two in North America. By the time SEATO was established in 1954, NATO had added two additional members, both in Europe. Of SEATO’s eight founding members, by contrast, exactly two—the Philippines and Thailand—were actually located in Southeast Asia, while the remaining six were either former colonial powers with interests in the region or regional powers from elsewhere in Asia. Poor regional adoption stemmed from a combination of legal restrictions and lukewarm enthusiasm. Some states like Malaya, which then included Singapore, saw little popular support for the alliance and chose to remain outside it. Burma and Indonesia, meanwhile, explicitly desired to remain neutral in the rapidly expanding Cold War. The United States strongly desired South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to become members, but the Geneva Accords prevented them from joining any formal military alliances. Instead, the United States ultimately won observer status for the three nations as well as inclusion under SEATO’s protection umbrella. Lack of regional adoption ultimately ensured SEATO would never be a top priority for its members, who had more pressing issues closer to home, and doomed the alliance to charges of merely being dressed up Western colonialism.

SEATO’s mutual defense provision was intended to mirror that of NATO. But whereas NATO Article V pledged that all members “agree that an armed attack against one… shall be considered an attack against them all,” and that all members would take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area,” SEATO Article IV merely asks signatories to recognize that “armed attack in the treaty area… would endanger its own peace and safety” and agree “in that event act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.”

NATO Article V vs. SEATO Article IV.

 

Whereas NATO called for collective action, SEATO called only for consultation, leaving each individual nation to react individually to internal threats. While this was partially an effort to avoid the veneer of neocolonialism and due to the prevalence of local insurgencies, it also reflected President Eisenhower’s desire to avoid being dragged into another Korean War.

Nowhere was this desire more apparent than in SEATO’s military structure. Whereas NATO provided for permanent troops under unified NATO command, SEATO maintained no military forces of its own or even independent intelligence gathering capabilities. Instead, it hosted annual joint military exercises for member states and otherwise relied on individual members to coordinate information and activities. As a result, SEATO was never asked to intervene militarily, even as the Laotian Crisis of 1961-62 threatened to extend communism into Laos—exactly the situation SEATO had been founded to prevent.

SEATO also faced cultural challenges. As the perceived threat of communist expansion shifted from a Korea-style invasion to internal subversion, SEATO took on a broader remit to strengthen the economic and cultural ties between the region and the West, including sponsoring a variety of conferences and exhibitions and opportunities for Southeast Asian scholars to study in Europe and the United States. However, as U.S. policy in the region became more and more centered on Vietnam, the priorities of SEATO’s anchor member began to cast a pall over the entire alliance. Members began backing away, and in 1972 started leaving entirely. Once France withdrew financial support in 1975, the remaining members agreed to dissolve the alliance. SEATO was officially disbanded in June 1977, after just under 23 years.

 

CENTO

With NSC 68’s first front under the watchful eyes of NATO, the second front largely stabilized following the Korean War, and SEATO now covering the fourth front, American strategists then turned their attention to the third front: the Middle East. The United States’ initial vision for the region was to link NATO’s easternmost member, Turkey, with SEATO’s westernmost member, Pakistan, by aligning the ‘Northern Tier’ of countries separating the Soviet Union from the Gulf. In order to do this, the United States planned to rely on the United Kingdom’s close relationships with its former possessions in the region to drive a pro-West agenda. This gamble, as well as reticence in Congress that Dulles attributed to “the pro-Israel lobby,” kept the United States out of the 1955 Baghdad Pact signed between the United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey (Lloyd, 1978). Instead, the United States signed individual agreements with each nation but accepted only an observer role in the Baghdad Pact.

However, much like Southeast Asia, circumstances soon changed dramatically. The Suez Crisis of 1956 effectively ended British involvement in the Middle East and bolstered the Soviet Union’s regional profile after they backed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Iraq’s 1958 coup and subsequent withdrawal from the Pact, which was then renamed CENTO, pressured the United States to increase support to remaining partners and become an associate member, though it never fully joined. Like SEATO, CENTO never created standing military forces under unified command, and its collective defense provisions were even weaker than those of SEATO: the 1955 agreement called for the parties to “co-operate for their security and defence,” but offered no specific obligations or enforcement mechanisms beyond a pledge that “the High Contracting Parties will determine the measures to be taken as soon as the present pact enters into force” (Baghdad Pact, 1955). These weak provisions were insufficient to rally the alliance to Pakistan’s defense during its 1971 war with India, though the United States did provide military assistance on a bilateral basis. The alliance effectively ended four years later when the United Kingdom withdrew financial support over Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, and formally disbanded in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution.

While it is easy today to look back on SEATO and CENTO as abject failures, at the time they were considered critical components of a global containment strategy. The factors we consider to be their downfall—weak mutual defense commitments with no standing forces under unified command—were conscious attempts to improve on NATO by limiting the risk of permanent worldwide U.S. troop deployments. Though SEATO was ultimately unsuccessful in its mission, it does establish a clear precedent for a NATO-like alliance in the region. However, any future attempt to establish a formal regional alliance would do well to learn from SEATO’s fundamental lesson: a military alliance is only as strong as its partners’ intent and capability to meet its commitments.

 

Multilateral Landscape Analysis

Were the United States to pursue a Pacific NATO alliance, it would need to navigate an already crowded regional web of multilateral organizations. This section will briefly assess seven existing regional partnerships to illustrate how a Pacific NATO could fit in to the current landscape and where it could conflict with existing U.S. commitments. These seven efforts include four—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, ANZUS, The Quad, and RIMPAC—that are led by or feature the United States as an active participant, two—the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that are China-led, and one—ASEAN—that works actively with both the United States and China.

 

ASEAN

ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was founded in 1967 with a mission to accelerate the economic growth, social progress and cultural development of the region. Today, ASEAN divides its mission into political-security, economic, and socio-cultural departments, each of which aims to promote greater cooperation primarily through dialogues and exchange programs. Its ten members—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—boast a combined population of 650 million and a combined GDP of almost $3 trillion.

ASEAN, thanks to its broad membership in a critical region, is also a crucial part of both U.S. and Chinese Indo-Pacific strategies. The United States’ 2019 ‘Free and Open Pacific’ strategy proclaims that “ASEAN sits at the geographical center of the Indo-Pacific and is central to our vision” (Department of State, 2019). For China, the group represents a major source of FDI inflows and outflows, as well as a potential vehicle for facilitating China’s goals in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. The United States has engaged with ASEAN since 1977, and in 2008 became the first non-ASEAN country to name a dedicated ambassador to the body. China, meanwhile, normalized relations with all ASEAN members in 1991, signed a free trade agreement (FTA) with the body in 2002, and also named an ambassador in 2008.

However, since President Trump took office in 2017 China has gained a significant upper hand in ASEAN relations. Despite Trump skipping the 2018 ASEAN Summit in Singapore, the United States boasted a number of accomplishments after the three-day meeting: a new cybersecurity cooperation agreement, a ‘smart cities partnership’ to promote digital infrastructure, and the Indo-Pacific Transparency Initiative, a $600 million flagship investment in regional governance. Meanwhile, China posted a record $590 billion in China-ASEAN trade in 2018.

Trump once again skipped the ASEAN Summit in November 2019, sending National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien—the lowest-ranking U.S. official to lead the delegation since 2011—in his place. In response, seven of ASEAN’s ten members refused to send heads of government to a follow-on U.S.-ASEAN summit later that month. China, meanwhile, used the ASEAN Summit to announce the conclusion of six years of negotiations around the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will become the world’s largest trading bloc and supersede the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the most important regional economic body.

 

Trans-Pacific Partnership

President Obama announced the United States’ ‘Pivot to Asia’ in November 2011, pledging to shift America’s focus to the world’s fastest-growing region after a decade of preoccupation with counterterrorism and the Middle East. The centerpiece of this pivot was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-member trade agreement that had been under negotiation since the Bush administration began talks in February 2008. While it did not include U.S. allies like Korea and Thailand, the TPP bloc represented 40 percent of global GDP and 40 percent of U.S. trade, and would have become the world’s largest free trade deal.

TPP was seen as not only a major economic partnership but also deeply important to U.S. national security. Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter saw TPP’s potential to strengthen U.S. ties in the region “as important as an aircraft carrier”—high praise from a Secretary of Defense (Carter 2018). Similarly, President Obama pitched TPP not only as an opportunity to bolster “good-paying, middle-class jobs in the United States” but also a way to “make sure the United States—and not countries like China—is the one writing this century’s rules for the world’s economy” (Obama, 2015).

TPP was signed in February 2016, but was ultimately only ratified by Japan and New Zealand. The United States, despite driving the negotiation for nearly eight years, became the core obstacle to its success. As trade evolved into a major issue on the 2016 campaign trail, TPP became a lightning rod for criticism: the top four vote-getters in the presidential race, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had spearheaded the negotiations for years, Donald Trump, and Senators Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders all pledged to withdraw the United States from TPP. Trump made good on this pledge on his third day in office in January 2017, effectively killing the deal.

After the U.S. withdrawal, the remaining countries attempted to salvage TPP by renegotiating and ultimately signing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which largely replicated TPP but excluded nearly two dozen provisions the United States had favored. CPTPP was signed in March 2018 and went into effect at the end of that year following ratification by Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam. The United States’ withdrawal from TPP also paved the way for China’s lesser known TPP alternative, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, to emerge from backwater status to become the region’s preeminent trade bloc.

 

ANZUS

The fall of China in 1949 renewed American interest in much of Asia, including the Antipodes. This prompted the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to sign a non-binding collective security agreement in 1951. The ANZUS treaty used language almost identical to what would become SEATO Article IV, promising merely that “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to [each Party’s] own peace and safety,” and that each nation “would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes” (ANZUS Treaty, 1951).

Like SEATO, ANZUS provided no integrated command structure or dedicated forces. SEATO superseded ANZUS when it was ratified three years later with the support of all ANZUS members, though it continued to serve as the foundation for joint U.S.-Australian military exercises. ANZUS was effectively killed in 1984 when New Zealand declared itself a nuclear-free zone, preventing U.S. nuclear-powered submarines from visiting the country’s ports. Two years later, the United States suspended treaty obligations toward New Zealand while confirming it would continue to honor all ANZUS obligations to Australia. U.S.-New Zealand relations remained strained for more than twenty years, though the two countries ultimately reconciled and announced a new strategic partnership in 2010, followed by New Zealand participation in RIMPAC exercises starting in 2012.

 

The Quad

In 2002, U.S., Australian, and Japanese officials began a series of discussions on terrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and U.S. security guarantees in the region. These talks eventually grew into the Trilateral Security Dialogue, which convened at the ministerial level for the first time in 2006. At the same time, the three nations began working with India as the Tsunami Core Group in 2004-05 in order to lead regional recovery after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. While the initial rationale for the group was that they “were the ones with the resources and the desire to act effectively and quickly,” all four understood that further cooperation could help enhance their regional influence (Madan, 2017). A series of state visits in 2006 culminated in a May 2007 exploratory meeting between the four countries that became known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad. This meeting was followed by expanded joint military exercises between the Quad and Singapore that September. The prospect of a security alliance between the United States, India, Australia, and Japan so worried China that is lodged formal protests with each government that summer. However, Quad discussions never evolved beyond one meeting and exercise, as Australia withdrew in 2008 as part of the new Rudd government’s broader efforts to foster closer relations with China.

The Quad lay largely dormant until November 2017, when the four parties met on the sidelines of the ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Manila. In a session chaired by Japan, senior officials convened around the theme of a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” and covered an agenda including “the rules-based order in Asia, freedom of navigation and overflight in the maritime commons, respect for international law, enhancing connectivity, maritime security, the North Korean threat and nonproliferation, and terrorism” (Panda, 2017a).

While some analysts argue the Quad is doomed to failure since “there is not a single vital national interest that all four share,” the group’s resurgence points to the dramatic changes in Pacific power dynamics since 2007 (Bisley, 2017). Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the region, along with repeated revelations of Chinese interference in domestic politics and higher education, has helped push Australia back to the table. Meanwhile, India’s anxieties surrounding the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor are fueling the historically non-aligned country’s desire for closer friends. It will still be some time before Quad negotiations return to the ministerial level. However, many now look to the Quad as one of the United States’ most promising ‘minilateral’ relationships.

 

RIMPAC

RIMPAC, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, is the world’s largest naval exercise. Led by the United States, it has been held 26 times since 1971, and is now conducted on a biennial basis. It provides an unparalleled opportunity for participating nations to enhance disaster relief, maritime security operations, sea control, and complex warfighting capabilities through amphibious operations, gunnery, missile, anti-submarine and air defense exercises, as well as counter-piracy operations, mine clearance operations, explosive ordnance disposal, and diving and salvage operations. RIMPAC 2018 included 46 surface ships, five submarines, 17 national land forces, and more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel representing 25 nations: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

In addition to its military value, RIMPAC also has significant diplomatic value. It has often been used to signal closer cooperation with the United States, as was the case when New Zealand rejoined RIMPAC in 2012. General David Petraeus cites RIMPAC as one of the most effective tools for strengthening defense relationships in the region (Petraeus and Caruso, 2019). Secretary Carter secured RIMPAC’s most significant addition in 2014, as China accepted an invitation to participate for the first time. Despite sending an uninvited spy ship in 2014, China was invited back for RIMPAC 2016. Secretary Carter defended the decision, arguing that “if China was to be excluded from military affairs in the region, it should be their doing, not America’s” (Carter 2018). However, the Trump administration disinvited China from RIMPAC 2018, citing “China’s continued militarization of disputed features in the South China Sea” which “only serve to raise tensions and destabilize the region” and run counter to the United States’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific (Eckstein, 2018). In response, China held joint naval exercises with the ten ASEAN nations in October 2018, the first time ASEAN has conducted joint exercises with another country.

 

Shanghai Cooperation Organization

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) represents the culmination of several efforts by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. Most significant of these was the 1997 Russian-Chinese Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order, in which the two powers explicitly rejected the unipolar, American-dominated world that had taken hold after the fall of the Soviet Union:

The Parties shall strive to promote the multipolarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order… The cold war is over. The bipolar system has vanished… The Parties are in favour of making mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual advantage, and peaceful coexistence… the basis for a new international order (Russian-Chinese Joint Declaration, 1997).

In 2001, Russia and China, along with the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, followed up on this declaration by founding the SCO, with the stated purpose of promoting “peace, security and stability” in Central Asia and promoting “efficient regional cooperation” in areas such as politics, trade, defense, and culture (China Daily, 2006). Historically, the SCO has focused particularly on Central Asian security—especially terrorism, ethnic separatism, and religious extremism—and energy issues. It has also held joint military exercises since 2003.

The United States applied for observer status in 2005 but was rejected, ostensibly due to its non-Asian location and its lack of geographic continuity with current members. However, Iran was granted observer status that same year despite sharing no land borders with SCO members. Today, the SCO boasts additional members India and Pakistan, who joined in 2017, four observer states—Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia—and six dialogue partners—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey—who function as limited members in specific areas.

There is little consensus on the SCO’s effectiveness. While it includes two of the world’s five largest militaries by personnel, its largest joint exercise involves only 3,000 troops between all eight members—a far cry from RIMPAC. Analysts argue that SCO departments are “chronically underfunded and have limited powers to take decisions independently of their member governments,” an assessment seemingly borne out by Russia and China’s frequent disagreements over the group’s economic agenda (Albert, 2015). Gisela Grieger, an analyst with the European Parliament, offers a stark final assessment: “Major shortcomings, such as institutional weaknesses, a lack of common financial funds for the implementation of joint projects and conflicting national interests” will prevent the SCO from achieving high levels of functional cooperation for the foreseeable future (Grieger, 2015).

 

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

When China first proposed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) at the 2011 ASEAN Summit, it was considered an unlikely pipe dream. Though it targeted 16 Indo-Pacific nations who together represent 3.4 billion people 39 percent of global GDP—a landmark effort under any other circumstances—half of the target states were already three years into U.S.-led TPP negotiations, then seen as the much more likely deal. The 16-party RCEP negotiations began in 2012 and included all ASEAN members as well as its six FTA partners: China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. However, it pointedly excluded the United States. Talks were held regularly alongside ASEAN summits and increased in seriousness as U.S. enthusiasm for TPP waned. The parties held nearly 30 rounds of talks between 2011 and 2019. India ultimately chose not to join, citing a lack of “credible assurance for India on market access and non-tariff barriers”—i.e. a fear that China would flood India with cheap goods without opening up its market in return (Anuja, 2019). Prime Minister Narendra Modi also faced significant domestic opposition from protectionist parties and farmers. However, the remaining 15 nations released a joint statement in November 2019, announcing the conclusion of RCEP negotiations and a commitment to sign the free trade deal in 2020.

It remains far too early to judge RCEP’s effectiveness. Though losing India weakens the bloc’s prestige, it still represents nearly a third of global GDP, double that of the European Union. Given RCEP’s structure as an FTA, it seems unlikely that the deal alone will bring significantly closer political or security ties in the immediate term. However, China has achieved in RCEP virtually everything the United States hoped to achieve with TPP, and it undeniably strengthens China’s hand in the region while weakening that of the United States. And it will only further cement China’s leverage as the primary economic partner for virtually every country in the region.

 

Potential Outlines of a Pacific NATO

This section will begin to answer three broad questions surrounding a potential Pacific NATO. First, how should such an alliance be structured? Should it be established as a new organization, or would it be possible to expand NATO well beyond its current geographic bounds? Second, what obligations should membership in such an alliance entail? And finally, what could qualifications for such an alliance look like? To answer this question, we will look to the case of Montenegro’s NATO accession.

 

Structure

It is often far easier to expand existing institutions to fit new purposes than to create new institutions from scratch, without the benefit of years or decades of buy-in and credibility. Could this work in the case of a Pacific NATO?

NATO Article X lays out the process for adding new members and specifically limits new membership to European nations:

The Parties may by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession (North Atlantic Treaty, 1949).

Since it was signed in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty has been modified three times. The first, upon the accession of Greece and Turkey in 1951, modified Article VI in order to more clearly enumerate the geographies covered by Article V. The second, in 1962, further modified the previous Article VI changes by noting that Algeria was no longer covered after gaining independence. The final modification was a footnote noting the date the treaty officially came into force. Since 1959, any member has been able to request a formal review of the treaty, in which all parties must participate. However, no member has yet requested such a review.

Expanding the NATO mandate to include Asian states would almost certainly require a full review rather than merely a footnote to Article X. And such an effort would almost certainly result in a significant backlash from at least two groups. The first would be countries who are working to foster closer ties with China or are significant recipients of Chinese investment. These include Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Montenegro. The second group that could likely resist such an expansion are the Baltic states, which are already heavily dependent on NATO security assistance and could see dramatic regional expansion as a threat to forces that are already stretched dangerously thin. Even if NATO were to successfully modify the North Atlantic Treaty to allow Asian nations to join, the NATO accession process requires unanimous consent to add new members. This means that any NATO member looking to curry favor with China could hold up NATO expansion indefinitely.

Another possibility could be to dramatically expand NATO’s Enhanced Opportunity Partners (EOP) program. Launched in 2014, the EOP program allows designated nations to work much more closely with NATO, including equal status to member states on procedural issues, regular political consultations on security matters, enhanced access to interoperability programs and exercises, information sharing, and closer operational association in times of crisis (NATO, 2019). However, it does not extend partners any Article V protections. NATO announced five inaugural EOPs in 2014: Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan, and Sweden. The inclusion of Australia and Jordan gives precedent for expanding the EOP program well outside Europe, including in the Indo-Pacific. It would also provide a natural escalation opportunity for lower-level ‘partners across the globe’ Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. Finland and Sweden have used their enhanced partnership to participate significantly in NATO collective defense exercises, including the 50,000-person Trident Juncture exercise in 2018, giving a possible roadmap for NATO EOP exercises in the Pacific. While this would certainly be more achievable than a revision of the North Atlantic Treaty, Hungary’s ability to unilaterally hold up Ukraine’s EOP status demonstrates the significant difficulties such a course would present.

As we will see throughout the remainder of this report, creating a new alliance is also extremely difficult. There is no easy structural option. But expanding the NATO EOP program, recognizing that it would come at the cost of the mutual defense obligations that have undergird NATO for decades, is perhaps the least difficult option.

 

Obligations

The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy calls for strengthening U.S. alliances in the Pacific into “a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains” (Department of Defense, 2018). However, the unclassified summary makes no mention of expanding or multilateralizing the United States’ regional bilateral security guarantees. The failures of SEATO and CENTO make clear the vital importance of explicit mutual defense pledges in an alliance. Former U.S. Ambassadors to NATO Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute similarly cite NATO’s mutual defense pledge as one of three key factors contributing to NATO’s success, alongside strong U.S. leadership and a shared set of democratic values among member states. If the United States were to pursue a NATO-type alliance in the Pacific, it would therefore be important to include mutual defense obligations on par with NATO Article V. While there are certainly diplomatic options, like an expanded NATO EOP program, that would not necessitate Article V-level commitments, we should not assume that such options would create a deterrence effect similar to NATO’s in Europe.

Organizing around a shared regional vision or set of values would prove more difficult in today’s Indo-Pacific than post-war Europe. In Europe, the 12 founding NATO members shared a broad consensus on the primacy of liberal democracy, increasing trade, and preventing further Soviet incursions into Europe. Today, Indo-Pacific nations hold a diverse range of societal values, views on the role of government, and visions for the region’s development—particularly as it relates to China. The United States has attempted to articulate a regional vision and set of values with the State Department’s November 2019 release of its regional strategy document, A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a Shared Vision. The four principles it sets forth are:

 

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has also embraced the ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ language, while Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has called for a similar-sounding “inclusive and open regional architecture.” This vision would seemingly have broad regional appeal. However, academic Mark Valencia points out that principles like respect for sovereignty and freedom of navigation are deceptively controversial in the region because they mean such different things in different countries (Valencia, 2018). And China in particular sees such framing as merely a veiled attempt to constrain it.

Another possibility could be to organize around relational principles instead of values-based principles. Secretary Carter described Pacific Command as playing a “politico-military role, which is to undergird generally friendly economic and political relationships and cooperative relationships among militaries” (Carter 2018). It would be possible to organize a Pacific alliance system around similar relational objectives of increasing economic ties and military cooperation. However, it would be difficult to differentiate any such network from its non-member neighbors based on these values alone, since “generally friendly economic and political relationships” could be fairly characterized as the objectives of virtually all state-to-state relations.

 

Qualifications

In order to be considered for possible NATO membership, a state must satisfy three broad criteria: it must be geographically in Europe, must be a democracy that furthers the democratic principles of the alliance, and must have the capacity and willingness to contribute to regional security. Having satisfied these prerequisites, a state may then be invited to join a Membership Action Plan (MAP): a tailored system of advice, assistance, and practical support focused on defense, military, political, and legal issues. Once a state has enacted satisfactory reforms and accepted the rights and obligations of membership, all current NATO members must sign and ratify the Accession Protocol, formally bringing the nation into NATO.

Five countries have undergone the MAP process since it began in 1999: Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia. For Albania and Croatia, the MAP process lasted seven years; for Montenegro, eight. North Macedonia began its MAP process in 1999, and will join NATO pending ratification by France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. Bosnia and Herzegovina began its MAP process in 2010. Since the MAP process varies on a case by case basis, it is worth reviewing the most recent successful case, Montenegro, in order to produce a set of benchmarks we could subsequently apply to a Pacific system.

When representatives from the Departments of State and Defense briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Montenegro’s NATO membership progress in 2016, they focused primarily on military and intelligence reforms and efforts to strengthen the rule of law. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dr. Michael Carpenter highlighted Montenegro’s efforts to build NATO interoperability in three areas: organizational structure and legal frameworks, personnel and training, and equipment and technology. When evaluating potential membership for a Pacific NATO, we should therefore consider each potential member’s ability to meet such standards with the United States one day one.

Carpenter also highlighted Montenegro’s “deep, structural reform” of its intelligence enterprise in order to bring the former Soviet ally more in line with member intelligence services (United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 2016). But more importantly, his testimony emphasized Montenegro’s commitments to NATO’s active mission in Afghanistan, noting that Montenegro had been with the United States in Afghanistan since shortly after independence in 2006 and that more than 20 percent of Montenegrin forces had served in the International Security Assistance Force or the Resolute Support mission.

The hearing also highlighted Montenegro’s efforts to improve the rule of law and further the democratic principles of the NATO alliance. Senator Ron Johnson praised Montenegro’s adoption of “a legal framework that encourages privatization, employment, and exports” (United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 2016). Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hoyt Brian Yee focused on Montenegro’s efforts to combat corruption, particularly the establishment of a new Special State Prosecutor’s Office based on the U.S. FBI and an Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. Deputy Assistant Secretary Yee also noted that Montenegro had been a U.S. partner in successive rounds of sanctions against Russia following the 2014 Crimea invasion. One thing that does not seem to have been a cause for concern, however, is the peaceful transition of power. At the time, Prime Minister Milo Đukanović was nearing the end of his fourth term since 1991.

Using the Montenegro case, we can derive a list of technical-level questions for evaluating potential members of a NATO-level Pacific alliance:

 

While these are important questions to consider when evaluating potential members’ suitability at a tactical level, there is a far more important political question that each country would have to answer far sooner: would it actually want to join?

 

Membership

This section will examine 12 countries with varying levels of U.S. partnership as potential members of a Pacific NATO: Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

 

U.S. security partnership hierarchy in the Indo-Pacific.

*22 U.S. Code § 2321k dictates that Taiwan should be treated
as a designated Major Non-NATO Ally.

 

Of these, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand represent the United States’ seven Major Non-NATO Allies in the region. India was recognized in 2016 as a Major Defense Partner, a designation that sits between an ally and security partner and carries with it many of the defense purchasing privileges of an alliance. Singapore has since 2005 been the United States’ only Major Security Cooperation Partner, giving the United States basing access in exchange for enhanced military and technology cooperation (Department of Defense, 2019). Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are considered Comprehensive Partners of the United States, creating opportunities for cooperation across security, economic, and other issues.

While each relationship is unique, there are common advantages and challenges across the region. Each country counts on the United States for critical security assistance and would benefit from further such support, giving the United States significant leverage in pushing for an enhanced security partnership. However, some countries may consider the price of an Article V-type obligation to their neighbors too high for the benefits of closer security cooperation with the United States. Several of these countries have ongoing territorial disputes, which would almost certainly have to be resolved prior to joining a mutual defense alliance. Many of these countries also purchase Russian military equipment, which would create significant interoperability concerns and potentially open up new allies to economic sanctions through the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

However, by far the most pressing concern for most countries is how such an alliance could impact their economic relationship with China. China is the top import partner of all 12 countries examined in this report, and the largest export partner of half. Any potential closer security partnership with the United States, especially a formal treaty alliance and that represents the largest mutual security pact since NATO and sits directly on China’s doorstep, must also be looked at through the lens of economic tradeoffs.

 

Selected economic relationships in the Indo-Pacific (WTO, 2019).

 

Australia

Australia and the United States have been allies since the ANZUS agreement of 1951, and Australia is the only country that has fought alongside the United States in every single war since World War I. As a result, Australia enjoys an extraordinarily close relationship with the United States and has served as the cornerstone of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia for decades. This close relationship has yielded significant geopolitical returns for the United States, including most recently Australia’s refusal to join the BRI despite multiple Chinese entreaties. And while Australia has become increasingly skeptical of Chinese influence in its businesses and universities, its future remains deeply tied to China. China is by far Australia’s largest trading partner, and Chinese FDI in Australia totaled $90 billion between 2007 and 2017—second only to the United States. This has led to the oft-repeated and understandable position among Australian politicians that they do not to be forced to choose between their security relationship with the United States and their economic relationship with China. Or, as the Australian Parliamentary Library once euphemistically put it, China’s rise has highlighted “Australia’s need to contextualise its alliance with the United States appropriately” (Church, 2013).

Australia’s regional strategy is driven by their ‘Pacific Step-Up’ policy, which pushes for increased Australian engagement in its near abroad to prevent any unaligned powers from gaining significant influence in the South Pacific. As a result, Australia has worked to secure Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and the Pacific islands within its sphere of influence through regional assistance missions and its Pacific Maritime Security Program. This brings Australia into indirect conflict with China, which has similarly sought to establish diplomatic primacy in Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and many of the Pacific island nations. Closer to home, the dual pull of the United States and China is best illustrated by the Port of Darwin, which has hosted U.S. troops since the Pivot to Asia in 2011—and which was bought by a Chinese holding company in 2017.

Australia’s balancing act would be made even more difficult by a potential Pacific NATO. Australia is already wary of the United States pulling it into conflict with China; the Australian Labour Party has taken the position that it would not join the United States to protect Taiwan, and there are rumors that the Liberal Party may be moving toward this position. A mutual defense obligation to not only Taiwan but several other regional partners may prove a bridge too far for even one of our closest Indo-Pacific allies. However, as Australia National University professor Michael Wesley puts it, “We’re facing an uncomfortable fact: that the major source of our economic prosperity is potentially in a position to challenge our most sacred values… It forces us to think about potentially forgoing some of that prosperity to stand up for what we believe in” (Wesley 2017). Should that possibility ever become a reality, it is likely that Australia would, like many countries, side with its values.

 

India

Since its earliest days as a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, India has been wary of entangling alliances and great power politics. This remains true today. However, few countries have more at stake in the Indo-Pacific than India, and China’s aggressive posture in the region has become a growing concern. The BRI—which India has yet to formally join—poses two major issues. The BRI’s Maritime Silk Road has nearly surrounded the Indian Ocean with significant economic and security projects in Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Djibouti, threatening a region in which India sees itself as dominant. China’s growing partnership with Indian archrival Pakistan is also of particular concern. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is in many ways the cornerstone of the BRI: it is both the largest BRI project by investment and arguably the most important strategically, as it gives China an alternative to the Strait of Malacca and more closely aligns India’s two greatest rivals.

Partially in response to China’s resurgence and the BRI, India has become much closer with the United States in recent years. Secretary Carter met with his Indian counterpart, Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar, “at least a dozen times,” and held “as many bilateral conversations with him as any of [his] other counterparts around the world” (Carter 2018). This cooperation culminated with India becoming a U.S. Major Defense Partner in June 2016. The designation, unique to India, gives it access to “a wide range of dual-use technologies” at “a level commensurate with that of [the United States’] closest allies and partners” (Panda, 2017b). However, it does not make India a U.S. ally. Rather, the Major Defense Partner designation is meant to lie ambiguously between that of a traditional ally and a Comprehensive Partner. Prime Minister Modi seems to enjoy a particularly strong relationship with President Trump, who welcomed him to the United States with a 50,000-person ‘Howdy Modi’ rally in Houston in September 2019. Two months later, the two countries held their largest bilateral military exercise in the Bay of Bengal.

Since implementation of the Major Defense Partnership began in earnest, the United States has replaced Russia as India’s largest arms supplier; India has bought $16 billion in U.S. defense platforms since entering the partnership, with billions more in the pipeline. However, India is also one of several countries negotiating with Russia to purchase the advanced S-400 air defense system, and signed an agreement in 2018 to purchase five systems at a cost of more than $5 billion. This brings India into direct and high-profile conflict with CAATSA, the U.S. law that mandates sanctions against U.S. allies and partners who purchase Russian military equipment. Then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis sought but was unable to secure a waiver for India, which is among dozens of U.S. allies and partners who purchase Russian equipment and could be affected. The S-400, which uses machine learning to better identify F-35s in stealth mode, is set to arrive in India by late 2020. Unless the United States can offer an alternative, like the Advanced Patriot or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, and convince India to forego the S-400, it will be exceedingly difficult for the two countries to broaden their security cooperation, despite their mutual strategic interest in doing so.

 

Indonesia

U.S.-Indonesian relations have been largely constructive since resolving the East Timor Crisis in 2000. Home to Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia is an important trade partner and, since the Global War on Terror began, an important security partner as well. However, the Global War on Terror sparked a significant backlash in Indonesian popular opinion: Indonesian’s views of the United States remained under 40 percent favorable throughout the Bush administration. While public opinion rebounded to more than 60 percent favorable for much of the Obama administration, it has dropped by more than 20 points since 2015. By contrast, Chinese favorability has never dropped below 53 percent since at least 2005 (Pew Research Center, 2018).

Indonesia became a U.S. Comprehensive Partner in 2010. Under the partnership, the United States agreed to work more closely with Indonesia on three strategic pillars: political and security cooperation, economic and development cooperation, and socio-cultural, educational, and science and technology cooperation. Specifically, the new U.S.-Indonesia defense relationship would involve cooperation on maritime and nuclear security, counter-terrorism, combatting economic crimes, and personnel and intelligence exchanges.

The United States has sought to underscore Indonesia’s importance as a security partner with visits by Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Patrick Shanahan during the Trump administration. However, Indonesia is also one of several countries in the region caught in CAATSA’s crosshairs. The Indonesian Defense Ministry had originally intended to spend as much as one-sixth of its 2019 budget acquiring 11 Russian Su-35 fighter jets. However, Indonesia has since slow-walked its Su-35 purchase and, in October 2019, announced plans to purchase two squadrons of American F-16s. Unless it receives a waiver from Congress, which seems unlikely, Indonesia appears to be backing away from further Russian military purchases. This is good news for U.S.-Indonesian interoperability, an important component of any NATO-like alliance. But it comes at the cost of increased tensions between the two countries at the same time as China is aggressively working to strengthen economic ties with far fewer strings attached.

 

Japan

Following its unconditional surrender in World War II and seven years of U.S. occupation, Japan has grown to become one of the United States’ most important allies. In 1951, the two countries signed a mutual security pact in which the United States agreed to become Japan’s primary security guarantor so Japan could focus on economic growth and abide its new pacifist constitution. The security relationship was upgraded in 1960 with the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which gave the United States basing rights in exchange for defending Japan in the event of armed attack. Those bases are now home to more than 50,000 American troops, by far the United States’ biggest overseas deployment today.

Japan’s pacifism has slowly evolved since the Vietnam War, culminating in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2015 legislation allowing Japan to “act in collective self-defense” with allies if it faces an “existential threat to Japan’s security” (Kallender-Umezu, 2015). Yet the newly empowered Japanese Self-Defense Forces still face two significant threats for which Japan counts on American support: China and North Korea. While China’s resurgence would have always raised tensions with what until 2010 was the world’s second-largest economy, the tension is particularly acute thanks to the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China refers to as the Diaoyus. The potentially oil-rich islands, administered by Japan from 1895 until the end of World War II and then returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, are also claimed by both China and Taiwan. While the relationship between China and Japan is largely stable, intermittent diplomatic clashes over the islands are seen as a plausible vector for escalating military conflict. Japan is also highly dependent on imports, including for more than 90 percent of its energy. Were China to gain control of the South China Sea or shift energy flows from the Strait of Malacca to the CPEC via the port of Gwadar, this could give China leverage to constrict energy flows to Japan similar to its restrictions on rare earth metal exports following a 2010 dispute in the Senkakus.

If China is a challenge, then North Korea, which now unambiguously possesses the capability to strike Japan with nuclear weapons, is an existential threat. The North Korea threat should align many of Japan’s interests with those of neighboring South Korea. However, Japan-South Korea relations are at one of their lowest points since the restoration of normal relations in 1965. Following a 2018 South Korean court ruling holding that Japanese companies must compensate South Korean workers for forced labor during World War II, both sides have taken retaliatory measures culminating in South Korea’s August 2019 decision to suspend bilateral intelligence sharing with Japan. This deeply hinders not only their ability to work together, but also with the United States.

As one of the United States’ strongest allies and a fellow advocate for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Japan would likely be positively inclined toward enhanced regional security cooperation. However, outstanding issues with South Korea, including restoring intelligence sharing and resolving the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands dispute, will be necessary preconditions for the two American allies to put aside a century of bad blood and commit to mutual defense.

 

Malaysia

The United States and Malaysia have enjoyed cordial relations since Malaysia’s independence in 1957. However, it has not been a particular focus of U.S. policy in the region. Though it shares access with Singapore and Indonesia to the crucial Strait of Malacca, through which 25 percent of global trade passes each year, Malaysia is often overshadowed by the wealthier Singapore ($57,700 GDP per capita vs. $9,800) and larger Indonesia (264 million people vs. 32 million). However, the United States has increased its focus on Malaysia since the 2011 Pivot to Asia. President Obama made the first U.S. presidential visit in nearly 50 years in 2014, during which he upgraded Malaysia to a U.S. Comprehensive Partner. Secretary of State Pompeo visited again in 2018.

At the same time, Malaysia’s relationship with China has come under increased scrutiny. The $34 billion, Chinese-financed Bandar Malaysia development and a corresponding railway connecting the country’s east and west coasts was supposed to serve as the BRI’s crown jewel in Malaysia. However, the deal fell apart in 2017 over payment disputes and public concern that Malaysia would never be able to pay back the Chinese loans. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad returned to power in 2018 on a pledge to save Malaysia from crushing foreign debt, going so far as to accuse the Prime Minister who negotiated the deal of “selling Malaysia’s sovereignty to China.” He suspended several other Chinese-backed megaprojects immediately upon taking office, calling China a “new colonial power” and warning its neighbors not to fall into China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” (Nambiar, 2019). However, in a sign of China’s irresistible economic gravity in the region, Prime Minister Mahathir rejoined the BRI in April 2019 and allowed several projects, including Bandar Malaysia, to resume.

Despite closer U.S. ties, Malaysia would be an unlikely participant in any formal treaty alliance. First, it would require at least a partial adjudication of the South China Sea challenge. Malaysia’s territorial claims overlap with those of China, Vietnam, and Brunei; resolving the dispute between Malaysia and Vietnam would be a necessary precursor for either joining a formal alliance with one another. A second challenge is that Prime Minister Mahathir has been a longtime skeptic of the United States, and a longtime booster of ASEAN. The successful conclusion of the RCEP, along with the resumption of major BRI projects, likely only further pushes Mahathir into the Chinese camp. “Mahathir sees China as an economic superpower with great benefit for the Malaysian economy,” concludes Malaysian academic Shankaran Nambiar. “There is no reason why he would want to be actively involved in a U.S. strategy seen as an effort to contain China’s sprawling influence” (Nambiar, 2019).

 

New Zealand

Like Australia, New Zealand’s relationship with the United States was originally governed by the ANZUS treaty. However, New Zealand’s decision to declare itself a ‘nuclear-free zone,’ thereby prohibiting U.S. nuclear submarines and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers from entering New Zealand ports, significantly soured relationships until 2010. Prime Minister John Key prioritized improving U.S. relations, which led to the Wellington Declaration of 2010 in which both sides agreed to put aside past differences and recognized each other’s “deep and abiding interest in maintaining peace, prosperity and stability in the region, expanding the benefits of freer and more open trade, and promoting and protecting freedom, democracy and human rights” (Wellington Declaration, 2012). This was followed by the Washington Declaration of 2012, in which U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and New Zealand Minister of Defense Jonathan Coleman pledged greater cooperation in maritime security, counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief.

Since 2018, New Zealand foreign policy has been driven by the ‘Pacific Reset’ policy, which, like the United States’ Pivot to Asia, is designed to signal New Zealand’s reprioritization of the region in the face of increased Chinese competition. New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade considers membership in regional organizations vital to “maintain a trajectory towards the free flow of goods, services, people and capital within a rules-based trading and economic system,” and explicitly lists invitations to “engage on new regional initiatives at their formative stages” as a KPI for the ministry (New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2018). Furthermore, the ministry specifically mentions its desire to build closer relationships with Japan, Singapore, India, and Indonesia. New Zealand’s Ministry of Defense similarly identifies “mak[ing] a credible contribution in support of peace and security in the Asia-Pacific Region, including in support of regional security agreements” as a core priority (New Zealand Ministry of Defence, 2018). While there are no shortage of options for achieving these objectives, an expanded Pacific alliance system would certainly help advance each of these goals.

In 2008, New Zealand became the first developed country to sign a comprehensive free trade agreement with China. Since then, China-New Zealand trade has tripled from $6.5 billion to nearly $20 billion, compared to $5.5 billion in U.S. investment in 2017. Yet New Zealand’s relationship with China remains challenging. New Zealand considers itself a protector for many small Pacific island countries like Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu, which are increasingly being targeted by Chinese investors. And Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was received coolly in an April 2019 trip to China after her government rejected a Huawei-linked 5G contract bid due to “significant network security risk” (Hampton, 2018).

Like most countries in the region, New Zealand is economically tied to China and does not want to be forced to choose between it and the United States. But as a Major Non-NATO Ally who has grown increasingly close to the United States amid China’s rise to regional dominance, one would expect it to strongly consider efforts to strengthen its relationship with its Asian democratic allies.

 

The Philippines

After gaining independence from the United States in 1946, relations between the Philippines and its former colonizer have been guided by their 1951 mutual defense treaty, in which each country pledges to “act to meet the common dangers” of “an armed attack in the Pacific Area” on either nation (U.S.-Philippines Treaty, 1951). However, Filipinos have recently come to question whether this vague language, while similar to many other U.S. defense treaties, would be sufficient to force the United States to intervene were China to attack the mainland Philippines or its assets in the South China Sea.

While U.S.-Philippines security relations were hampered by Philippine refusal to renew American basing rights in 1991, the United States continued to provide support for the Philippines’ counterinsurgency campaign as well as hold annual joint exercises. In recognition of the Philippines’ contributions to the Global War on Terror, President George W. Bush designated the Philippines a Major Non-NATO Ally in 2003. Filipinos have historically had one of the highest opinions of the United States in the world, fluctuating between 78 and 92 percent since 2002 (Pew Research Center, 2018). However, the relationship soured significantly after Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in June 2016. Within three months, President Obama cancelled a planned meeting with Duterte after Duterte called him a “son of a whore” for criticizing the explosion of extrajudicial killings under Duterte’s anti-drug trafficking campaign (Gayle, 2017). Duterte also suspended joint military exercises for several years.

In October 2016, Duterte traveled to China and made an extraordinary speech at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. “In this venue, your honors,” he proclaimed, “I announce my separation from the United States… Both in military, not maybe social, but economics also. America has lost.” While the relationship is perceived to be regaining ground under President Trump, there is little doubt that, at least while Duterte remains in office, the Philippines has made its choice.

Even if U.S.-Philippines relations were to reverse under a subsequent Philippine administration, the country would still bring significant baggage to any multilateral alliance. Its South China Sea claims conflict with Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan, and the country only recently ended a 50-year insurgency that included multiple ISIS-aligned jihadist groups. Though it remains ostensibly a U.S. ally, the Philippines is an unlikely candidate for any future U.S.-led efforts to manage China, despite its ongoing disputes with China in the South China Sea.

 

Singapore

As a city-state of under 6 million people in a neighborhood that includes the largest countries in the world, Singapore has survived by threading an exceedingly narrow needle between the United States and China. Though it only formally opened relations with China in 1990, Singapore and its longtime prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, have been important intermediaries between China and the West for decades; Lee is largely considered the greatest China watcher of his generation.

Singapore has often supported both China and the United States’ core regional visions. It has been an active supporter of the U.S. alliance system in Asia, while also assiduously promoting ASEAN cooperation with China and the BRI. In areas where Chinese and U.S. interests clearly clash, like the South China Sea, Singapore attempts to stay neutral. However, a 2016 dispute in which China accused Singapore of supporting the Philippines’ South China Sea claims against China soured Sino-Singapore relations for several years. Some analysts felt this represented a larger concern in Beijing that Singapore “sought only economic benefits from China, while relying on the U.S. for security” (Jaipragas 2017). In April 2019, the two countries seemingly reconciled by signing five agreements for closer collaboration on trade, law enforcement, and the BRI.

U.S. cooperation with Singapore remains strong, particularly in the security space. The United States recognized Singapore as a Major Security Cooperation Partner in 2005, a unique status meant to elevate the U.S.-Singapore relationship above the Comprehensive Partnership level. More Singaporean officers train in the United States than any other country, and in August 2019 the United States and Singapore extended an MOU granting U.S. military access to Singapore’s air and naval bases and logistical support for transiting personnel, aircraft, and vessels for an additional 15 years. But more than any other country in the region, Singapore cannot afford to be caught be caught between the United States and China. Many countries toe the line that they do not want to be forced to choose between the two countries. For Singapore, this is existential.

 

South Korea

Over 36,000 Americans gave their lives defending South Korea during the Korean War, and the two countries have remained close allies ever since. South Korea became one of the United States’ first Major Non-NATO Allies when the classification was created in 1989, alongside Australia, Egypt, Israel, and Japan. 28,500 American troops still serve in South Korea, America’s largest overseas deployment after Japan and Germany. South Korea also hosts the largest U.S. overseas base in the world.

The overwhelming security focus of the U.S.-South Korean alliance is North Korea. South Korea lives under constant threat of conventional or nuclear attack from the North; experts estimate a conflict on the peninsula could kill 300,000 South Koreans in the first few days, with casualties ultimately totaling multiple millions (Dreizen, 2018). North Korea has also demonstrated its ability to reach targets across the United States, potentially threatening millions of Americans. South Korea, with its 600,000 troops and its existence on the line, is the United States’ indispensable partner in its efforts to “contain, deter, and, if necessary, defeat” North Korea (Revere, 2016). In addition to its massive external challenges, the U.S.-South Korean alliance also faces significant internal challenges. President Trump’s leader-to-leader negotiating strategy with North Korea has rattled many South Koreans, particularly as three years of this approach has yielded little in tangible outcomes. Tensions have been further inflamed by Trump’s November 2019 demand that South Korea increase annual payments for hosting U.S. troops from $1 billion to $4.7 billion, a figure that reportedly “came out of thin air” and has drawn condemnation from both countries, including congressional Republicans (Gaouette, 2019).

South Korea’s relationship with China is best illustrated by their 2017 dispute over the deployment of U.S. THAAD missile defense systems. China, fearing the THAAD systems could be used by the United States to spy on mainland China, responded with unofficial economic sanctions in March 2017, including banning Chinese tour groups from visiting South Korea. South Korea and China’s economies have become deeply intertwined in the last twenty years, and the Chinese sanctions are estimated to have cost South Korea more than $15.6 billion. South Korea did not cave on THAAD. But in exchange for normalizing relations in November 2017, South Korea agreed to place no further anti-ballistic missile systems in the country, not join any region-wide U.S. missile defense system, and not join any military alliance involving the United States and Japan. The ‘three no’s,’ as they have become known, “creates a precedent that links economics to political and national security,” explains South Korean academic Joseph Yi. “Korea would never do that if it was any other country, like Vietnam or Japan, but they’re doing it for China because the only other way is to ally with Japan and that’s not an option for the left” (Volodsko, 2017).

Getting South Korea and Japan to work together is one of the biggest challenges to a potential Pacific treaty alliance. Despite a belief that shared self-interest will eventually trump historical enmity, relations between the two countries are at their lowest point in decades while their self-interest in jointly addressing the China challenge has never been higher. The legacy of Japanese colonialism, argues American professor Richard Samuels, still weighs heavily. “Too many Japanese history textbooks have been written with erasers, and too many Korean commentaries have been crafted to privilege victimization” (Samuels, 2019). But even if the two countries were to resolve their differences, South Korea would still face the challenge of its pledge to not join any U.S.-Japan alliance and the proven economic consequences that violating it would bring.

 

Taiwan

The United States recognized the Republic of China as the legitimate government of China from 1911 to 1979, and in 1955 signed a mutual defense treaty that pledged military assistance in the event of armed attack but did not support unilateral military action against the People’s Republic. When the United States formally abrogated its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, U.S.-Taiwan relations were subsequently governed by the Taiwan Relations Act. The Taiwan Relations Act recognized Taiwan as the equivalent of a foreign nation state and carried over several of the mutual defense treaty’s obligations, including a pledge that the United States would “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” (22 USC Ch. 48). However, it neither explicitly guarantees nor precludes U.S. military intervention on Taiwan’s behalf. Military sales remain robust to this day; the Trump administration approved up to $10 billion for 2019. U.S.-Taiwan relations were significantly upgraded in 2018 with the Taiwan Travel Act, which allows U.S. officials to visit Taiwanese counterparts and high-level Taiwanese officials to visit the United States.

The Chinese Communist Party considers Taiwan an inviolable part of China, and the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China a core national interest. Most Taiwanese, however, disagree. Only 10-15 percent of Taiwanese want reunification now or in the future. 85 percent favor the ambiguous status quo, though that is primarily because most Taiwanese feel they will be attacked if they declare independence and 70 percent believe they are already de facto independent (Bush, 2019).

Much of China’s recent aggressiveness in the South and East China Seas can be attributed to their humiliation in the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, in which they were unable to prevent a U.S. carrier group from sailing through the Taiwan Strait in a show of support for Taiwan. Few believe the United States would attempt a similar move today, leading to questions of whether the United States would or even could come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese attack. A multilateral mutual defense alliance including Taiwan would almost certainly be unacceptable to China. It would also undermine decades of U.S. ‘strategic ambiguity’ towards Taiwan, forcing the United States—and any other nation who joined such an alliance—to take a firm stance on Taiwan. Including Taiwan in such an alliance could provoke a response similar to Russia’s retaliation over NATO flirtations with Georgia and Ukraine. It would also require resolving South China Sea disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and could prove a major barrier for other potential members who are not eager to take sides in what some consider the most combustible dispute on the planet. Excluding Taiwan, however, sends a clear message to Beijing that the United States is not willing to fight to defend it.

 

Thailand

The U.S.-Thailand security relationship is primarily governed by three documents. The first is the Manila Pact, which remains in force despite the dissolution of SEATO in 1977. The second is the Thanat-Rusk communiqué of 1962, which pledged that the United States would come to Thailand’s defense if it faced aggression by neighboring nations. This promise by Secretary of State Dean Rusk was driven primarily by fears of communist expansion in the region, though in Thailand’s case these fears proved largely unfounded. The final document is the 2012 Joint Vision Statement for the Thai-U.S. Defense Alliance, which clarifies the 21st century focus areas for the alliance: regional security in Southeast Asia, stability in the Asia-Pacific, and bilateral and multilateral interoperability and readiness.

After strengthening its security cooperation with the United States in the wake of September 11 and agreeing to send troops to Iraq, Thailand became the United States’ tenth Major Non-NATO Ally in December 2003, earning the same distinction as crucial Asian allies like Australia, Japan, and South Korea. However, the relationship has deteriorated significantly since Thailand’s 2014 military coup, the country’s 12th since 1932. At the time, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged that “this act will have negative implications for the U.S.–Thai relationship, especially for our relationship with the Thai military” (Kerry, 2014). While the United States placed restrictions on defense cooperation after the coup, China quickly stepped in and filled the void: since the coup, China and Thailand have signed ten defense purchase agreements, including Thailand’s largest ever at over $1 billion. And while Thailand conducts more than 40 joint military exercises with the United States every year, they now conduct more exercises with China than any other Southeast Asian country. In a sign of how far the United States’ relationship with one of its major allies has fallen, Thai Defence Ministry official Raksak Rojphimphun told reporters at a 2019 regional defense gathering that “It’s about creating balance—we can’t choose sides, we have to be friendly to everyone. We’re a small country. We can’t choose our friends” (Heijmans, 2019).

One benefit of Thailand’s geography is that it does not have any territorial disputes in the South China Sea, avoiding a hurdle that many other potential alliance members would have to clear before joining. However, Thailand’s shift from staunch U.S. ally to hedging its bets in the region makes it an unlikely contender to join a U.S.-led alliance that excludes China.

 

Vietnam

U.S.-Vietnam relations remain deeply defined by the Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of well over one million Vietnamese. It took more than 20 years following the war for the two countries to normalize relations. However, trade between the two countries has since exploded, and today Vietnam is among the United States’ top trading partners. The United States also enjoys an 84 percent favorability rating in Vietnam, among the highest anywhere in the world (Pew Research Center, 2018).

Despite being Vietnam’s largest trading partner and a nominal ideological ally as a fellow communist state, China is deeply unpopular among Vietnamese: only 10 percent of Vietnamese held a favorable opinion of China in 2017 (Pew Research Center, 2018). Much of this animosity comes from a 2014 incident in which a Chinese oil rig entered and occupied Vietnam-claimed territory in the Paracel Islands for four months. The Vietnamese responded with an unprecedented scale of anti-China protests and riots, which ultimately forced 111,000 laborers out of work and thousands of Chinese workers to flee the country, resulted in over 1,000 arrests, and led to at least 3 deaths. China ultimately withdrew the oil rig after ten weeks.

President Obama named Vietnam a Comprehensive Partner in 2013, and in 2016 became the first U.S. president to visit the country. While there, he announced the full removal of a military arms embargo that had been in place for nearly 50 years, a move that the Vietnamese had lobbied heavily for in the wake of the 2014 Paracels incident. Vietnam subsequently purchased more than $54 million in U.S. military equipment in 2017. However, this pales in comparison to Vietnam’s nearly $467 million in Russian military purchases that year. Russia is also reportedly encouraging Vietnam to purchase the same S-400 missile defense system that threatens to fracture Turkey from the rest of NATO. Vietnam, alongside India and Indonesia, has come under increased pressure via CAATSA to curb Russian military purchases. Like Indonesia, Vietnam has begun reducing its Russian military purchases, which dropped to $327 million in 2018. U.S. purchases last year, however, fell to $0.

Vietnam has among the most difficult South China Sea claims, overlapping with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Brunei. Were it to join a Pacific treaty alliance, it would need to resolve territorial disputes with virtually every South China Sea claimant except China.

 

Likely Challenges

The world is fundamentally different from when NATO was formed in 1949. In 1949, the Soviet Union had recently taken over Eastern Europe and posed an immediate and credible threat to the rest of the continent. In 1949, the United States was the world’s sole economic power and dominant military power, representing half of global GDP. The United States has far less leverage today. While many Asian nations fear China’s increased aggression in the region, few people believe that China is ready to invade Vietnam tomorrow. By some measures, China has overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest economy; by several others, it could happen as early as next year. China’s economic leverage, as demonstrated by cases like Malaysia, Singapore, and, most strikingly, South Korea, may prove sufficient to not only dissuade Indo-Pacific nations from pursuing a multilateral, U.S.-led alliance out of fear, but positively persuade them to choose China on the merits. “It was crucial in the Cold War that we had a network of extraordinarily effective alliances,” argues historian Niall Ferguson. “If we go full Cold War now and expect the same allies to show up unequivocally on our side, we may be rudely awakened when a lot of them say they will be nonaligned this time” (Ferguson, 2019).

A Pacific NATO would also likely confirm the Chinese government’s most conspiratorial fears about U.S. motives in the Pacific, ones which the United States has spent decades working to allay. “Chinese leaders prefer to be convinced that we see them as a hostile power, and that our real strategy is containment,” says Secretary Carter:

Not only is that untrue; it would be unwise. China is not the Soviet Union, and Asia today is not Europe in the post-war period. Unlike the USSR, which wanted to make a communist world, China has no such stated intention. Despite its sometimes heated rhetoric, Beijing has a strong interest in preserving the institutions and security structure that have enabled its rise, while ensuring that its own internal governance is largely unchallenged. The Warsaw Pact existed to oppose the Western democracies’ post-war vision of European security. Far from impeding it, the U.S.-led post-war security architecture in the Pacific has unquestionably fueled China’s revitalization. But while some Chinese officials still grudgingly acknowledge this fact, the dictatorship’s internal propaganda ignores it entirely (Carter 2018).

A 2019 Defense Intelligence Agency report, however, is less optimistic:

While it calls for a peer-to-peer cooperative relationship with the United States, China also believes that U.S. military presence and U.S.-led security architecture in Asia seeks to constrain China’s rise and interfere with China’s sovereignty, particularly in a Taiwan conflict scenario and in the East and South China Seas. Since at least the 1990’s, Beijing has repeatedly communicated its preference to move away from the U.S.-led regional security system and has pursued its own regional security initiatives in support of what it views as a natural transition to regional predominance (Defense Intelligence Agency, 2019).

Despite a disagreement over Beijing’s satisfaction with the current international architecture, there is little doubt that a multilateral, U.S.-led security alliance in the Pacific—particularly one involving Taiwan—would draw swift Chinese condemnation and a whole-of-government response. When China learned of the Quad’s first exploratory meeting in 2007, it sent demarches to each nation accusing them of trying to gang up against China, and accused their joint military exercises of laying the foundation for an ‘Asian NATO.’ China has been far more sanguine about the Quad’s potential resurgence, due to perceived divergences between U.S. allies, many states’ economic dependence on China, and U.S. self-restraint (Wuthnow, 2019). Were the United States to throw this restraint to the wind and attempt to unite its allies, China would likely respond with far more than a stern demarche.

That is why Secretary Carter instead advocates for a “principled, inclusive network,” one driven by shared principles like peaceful conflict resolution, freedom of commerce, and shared security responsibilities; open to China to participate where it will; and composed of flexible networks that recognize the history of Indo-Pacific diplomacy. The network he advocates for is a “multi-layered complex of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral, that can accommodate a wide variety of interests within a shared regional understanding of fundamentals” (Carter 2018).

There is also the herculean matter of uniting a critical mass of U.S. allies and partners. Even the United States’ strongest allies, like Australia, Japan, and South Korea, would face enormous headwinds in pursuing a multilateral alliance, particularly after South Korea removed China’s economic boot from its neck by promising to not do exactly that. And there remains the challenge of getting Japan and South Korea to work together as their bilateral relationship reaches a post-World War II nadir. It is not obvious that ostensible allies like the Philippines or Thailand would see the value in provoking China’s wrath; the value proposition for less stalwart partners like Indonesia or Malaysia is even murkier. And it is unclear that any nation has an appetite for wading into the Taiwan controversy.

Operational challenges also abound. Six of the identified nations have territorial disputes that would need to be resolved, while several, including India, have made massive investments in advanced Russian military equipment that would need to be transitioned to systems interoperable with the United States. And at a time when officials are questioning the United States’ ability to meet our defense obligations to NATO allies in the Baltics, could we realistically meet similar obligations to Malaysia or Vietnam?

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge, however, is a strategic one. If Ferguson’s assessment of the U.S.-China challenge is correct, and we are currently in the midst a Cold War II that encompasses trade, technology, currency, capital, military, and cultural competition, and that the technological and economic fights are the most important to win, then is a military alliance an appropriate cornerstone for our efforts? Arguably not.

 

Conclusion

Ferguson argues that the U.S. alliance system, exemplified by NATO, was crucial to the United States’ success in the Cold War. The United States is long in allies in the Pacific, including some of our most valuable. China, by contrast, has very few. “Unless you think Kim Jong Un is dependable,” argues Secretary Carter, “the correct answer is zero” (Carter 2018). Pursuing a Pacific NATO strategy for meeting the China challenge could therefore play to the United States’ regional advantages, building on a model with historical precedent in SEATO and a demonstrable success case in NATO itself. However, there are significant challenges to such an approach. Unifying a critical mass of U.S. allies and partners, even longstanding allies like Japan and South Korea, in the face of Chinese economic leverage presents a massive diplomatic challenge that will require significant concessions elsewhere. It is also all but certain to dramatically escalate tensions at a time when the U.S.-China relationship is already suffering and Chinese influence in its near abroad is at its strongest in 200 years. And it is not clear that a Pacific NATO would help address the broader diplomatic, economic, and technological aspects of U.S.-China competition.

Rather than pursue the herculean task of a unified Pacific alliance, the United States would be better suited working to enhance existing powerful networks, like the Quad or the NATO EOP program. The Quad already encompasses four of the most important Indo-Pacific powers, creating opportunities for collective action without the internal or external baggage of mutual defense. And the NATO EOP provides a roadmap for bringing the NATO system, albeit with the same lack of Article V protections that doomed SEATO, to the Indo-Pacific. The United States should focus on either expanding the Quad to include other important Pacific players, including New Zealand and—though extremely difficult—South Korea, or expanding the NATO EOP program in the Indo-Pacific beyond Australia to a similar set of regional partners.

At the same time, the United States must recognize that the security competition is just one of many fronts in this so-called new Cold War. Though the United States faces fierce competition from China, it remains the most advanced economy on earth and has plenty to offer Indo-Pacific nations. We made a critical mistake in abandoning the TPP, ceding the initiative to China and allowing the RCEP to likely emerge as the world’s largest trading bloc. Reestablishing the United States’ economic role in the Indo-Pacific, likely with the help of non-RCEP member India, should therefore be a top priority. Together, an enhanced Quad or NATO EOP program and revitalized version of the TPP can provide much of the value of a Pacific NATO, with far greater flexibility, at a fraction of the diplomatic cost.

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^{Wuthnow, J. (2019). U.S. ‘Minilateralism’ in Asia and China’s Responses: A New Security Dilemma?, Journal of Contemporary China, 28:115, 133-150, DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1497916.}

1. The survival of the nation as a free democracy.
2. Prevention of catastrophic attacks on the homeland.
3. The health and security of the global economic system.
4. Secure, reliable, and confident allies and partners.
5. Protection of U.S. citizens abroad.
6. Protection of universal values of freedom and respect for human rights (Winnefeld et al., 2016).
7. Respect for sovereignty and independence of all nations;
8. Peaceful resolution of disputes;
9. Free, fair, and reciprocal trade based on open investment, transparent agreements, and connectivity; and
10. Adherence to international law, including freedom of navigation and overflight (Department of State, 2019).
11. Does the nation respect the rule of law, hold free and fair elections, and have a low tolerance for corruption?
12. Does it have an appropriate military organizational structure and legal framework to support interoperability?
13. Are its personnel, training, equipment, and technology up to U.S. standards and interoperable with U.S. systems and units?