The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Europe’s concern with the Indo-Pacific is a natural and important one. Russia’s military-industrial base is sustained largely because of Chinese support. A staggering 80% of Russia’s sanctions evasion is through Chinese entities, according to German authorities. North Korea has provided invaluable materiel such as artillery shells to support Russia’s war effort and sent anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 of its troops into the battlefield.
The fourth annual Brussels Indo-Pacific Dialogue (BIPD) recently brought together high-level officials and experts from Europe, the United States, and Asia to discuss the future of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. I was there for the George W. Bush Institute.
As former Japanese Prime Minister Isheba Shigeru said, “Ukraine today can be the East Asia of tomorrow.”
NATO’s latest Strategic Concept, released at the June 2022 summit in Madrid, rightly stated that Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” But it also underlined that a group of “authoritarian actors,” including China, Iran, and North Korea, that is seeking to fundamentally “challenge our interests, values, and democratic way of life.”
The document identified the Indo-Pacific as “important for NATO, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.”
These sentiments echoed throughout this year’s BIPD. In the event’s high-level panel, NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Shekerinska emphasized the importance of enhancing collaboration with the alliance’s four democratic partners in the Indo-Pacific (“IP4”) – Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. This echoed the statement issued during the 2025 NATO summit in the Hague, the Netherlands, in June.
Belen Martinez Carbonell, Shekerinska’s counterpart on the panel and secretary general of the European Union’s external service, emphasized a similar commitment from the EU. The four ambassadors of these nations were present at the event and reaffirmed their willingness to reciprocate.
I had the opportunity to ask Shekerinska about the fate of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, as stipulated by the 2008 Bucharest summit declaration. She reaffirmed that the decision to admit Ukraine remains in force and is “irreversible,” but still depends on the consensus of all 32 member states. The present focus, Shekerinska noted, should be on helping Ukraine with urgent needs on the battlefield, as well as the ongoing peace negotiations between the various parties.
I also asked Martinez Carbonell about the EU’s plans to work with like-minded nations to end Western dependency on Chinese critical raw materials. She said that the EU is keenly aware of this issue and has a “vast agenda of diversifying” these supplies, not wanting to fall into the same trap it once did with Russian-supplied energy. As China is increasingly weaponizing its domination of these industries, joint action on this issue should be an urgent priority.
This year’s BIPD took place among a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape.
NATO rose out of the ashes of World War II and the subsequent threat of Soviet dominance in Europe. Until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the alliance’s mission was inexorably linked to the defense against the threat of a massive, land-based Soviet invasion of Western Europe. After the Soviet collapse, NATO’s mission grew with a humanitarian intervention to stop the genocide in Kosovo in 1999.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, the alliance invoked its collective defense (or “Article 5”) powers for the first – and so far only – time in its existence. In response, NATO launched a mission in Afghanistan that ended in 2021, following the U.S. military withdrawal.
The sense now among the BIPD participants is that Russia’s war against Ukraine, China’s rise, and America’s inward shift are presaging a time of great uncertainty in global affairs. As the late U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fond of saying, we are living in a time of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” with fewer “known knowns” to rely upon.
