WASHINGTON — Four Indo-Pacific countries attending the NATO summit issued a joint statement on Thursday “strongly condemning” the “illegal military cooperation” between Russia and North Korea, showing how the military alliance and its Pacific partners are working more closely together to combat what they see as a shared threat to security.
For the third year in a row, leaders or their deputies from Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia – which are not NATO members – attended the high-level meeting of the 75-year-old military alliance of European and North American countries. In Washington they launched cooperation projects on Ukraine, disinformation, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
“We will address our shared security challenges, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, China’s support for Russia’s war economy, and the growing alignment of authoritarian powers,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said during a meeting with officials from the four Pacific partners. “We must work even more closely together to keep the peace and protect the rules-based international order.”
“Our security is not regional. It is global,” he said.
The White House said it welcomed the presence of the four Indo-Pacific countries at the NATO meeting because the threats and challenges in the regions are interconnected.
In an interview with South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, Deputy Foreign Minister Kurt Campbell said Washington wants to “institutionalize” the grouping of the four countries as it refocuses its attention on the region.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol told his fellow leaders that solidarity among like-minded countries is more important than ever as we face interlinked challenges such as the war in Ukraine and Pyongyang’s provocations.
He said South Korea welcomed NATO airworthiness certification for Korean aircraft, which he said would ensure “mutual military compatibility.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said he would like to lay the foundation for “long, lasting cooperation” between NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners.
Kishida told reporters that Japan and NATO would “strengthen” procedures for sharing highly sensitive intelligence and that Japan would conduct a joint exercise with NATO in the Euro-Atlantic region, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.
New Zealand signed a partnership program with NATO, although details were not immediately known. Stoltenberg wrote on the social platform X that it would take cooperation between New Zealand and the transatlantic alliance to “unprecedented levels.”
The Australian government has announced the world’s largest military aid package, worth almost AU$250 million (US$167 million), for Ukraine.
“The delivery of highly capable air defence capabilities and air-to-ground precision munitions represents Australia’s largest single package of support to Ukraine and will make a huge contribution to efforts to end the conflict on its terms,” said Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy along with other leaders from the Indo-Pacific region.
China, which NATO on Wednesday declared a “decisive facilitator” of Russia’s war efforts, opposes NATO’s reach into the Indo-Pacific region. It harms China’s interests and disrupts peace and stability in the region, said Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
“Don’t bring instability to the Asia-Pacific region after what happened in Europe,” he said on Thursday.
But it is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the North Korean growing alliance with Russiaand China’s role as the main supplier of dual-use technology to Russia, which are driving cooperation between NATO’s 32 member states and the four Indo-Pacific countries, said Kenneth Weinstein, the Japanese chairman of the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute.
The growing partnerships, he said, are “key to strengthening deterrence.”