To evaluate NATO’s growing interest in the Asia-Pacific, the Ankara Center for Crisis and Political Studies (ANKASAM) presents below an interview with Alejandro Reyes, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration (PPA) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU).
1. How do you assess NATO’s growing interest in the Indo-Pacific region following the 2022 Madrid Summit?
The Madrid Summit marked a real shift, but I’d separate two things – NATO taking a greater interest in the Indo-Pacific, and NATO extending itself into the Indo-Pacific. Not the same things. The point behind the shift is that European and Asian security can no longer be treated as separate theatres. Russia’s war in Ukraine, the closer strategic relationship between Russia and China, North Korea’s support for Russia, cyber and technological competition, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and maritime security all show how developments in one region carry consequences in the other. So for NATO, closer engagement with Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand is mainly about political consultation, resilience, cyber security, emerging technologies, interoperability, defence industrial cooperation and exchanging assessments of shared security challenges. Despite talk of the alliance opening an office in Tokyo, I would not call this NATO’s geographical expansion, however. NATO remains a North Atlantic collective-defence alliance, and Article 5 has not at all been extended to the Indo-Pacific. There is a significant line between partnership and alliance membership.
2. From 2022 to the present, the participation of leaders from the Indo-Pacific Four (Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) in NATO summits each year at various levels—such as president, prime minister, or minister—what does this signify? How do you interpret this?
I see it mainly as the institutionalisation of a relationship that was already developing. The presence of the four Indo-Pacific partners at Madrid in 2022 was significant symbolically, since it was the first time their leaders collectively took part in a NATO summit. Their participation since has simply made that dialogue routine. It reflects recognition on both sides that the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security environments are connected. The level of representation has varied, though. All four sent national leaders to the 2022 and 2023 summits, but Australia’s PM skipped 2024 in favor of a ministerial delegation. In 2025, and again in Ankara in 2026, representation was mixed between leaders and senior ministers or officials. The relationship is deepening, but there is no fixed track toward NATO membership or an extension of NATO’s collective-defence obligations. The flexibility may in fact be one of its strengths of this partnership arrangement. These countries can work closely with NATO where interests align, without building a new formal alliance structure, something I doubt we’ll see in the Asia Pacific.
3. In your opinion, could the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) countries establish their own defense and security alliances in the region without the support of Western allies? What are the obstacles to this?
There’s an important issue here. Australia and New Zealand are themselves generally considered Western countries, while Japan and South Korea are longstanding US treaty allies. Their existing security arrangements are already deeply tied to the broader US alliance system. An autonomous IP4 collective-defence alliance is possible in theory, but I think it’s unlikely – and probably unnecessary. The four countries don’t face identical threats. South Korea remains overwhelmingly focused on North Korea. Japan is watching China, North Korea and Russia. Australia has an increasingly broad Indo-Pacific outlook, while New Zealand has traditionally kept a different defence posture altogether, with an eye towards the southern Pacific. There are also historical and political sensitivities, particularly between Japan and South Korea, along with real differences in defence capabilities, constitutional arrangements, economic relationships with China and national appetite for collective military obligations. Above all, anything comparable to NATO would take far more than political cooperation. It would need a credible mutual-defence commitment, integrated military planning, command structures, interoperability and ultimately some answer on nuclear deterrence. My own sense is that the Indo-Pacific is much more likely to develop through a network of overlapping arrangements and “minilateral” partnerships than a single NATO-style organisation. The Quad, AUKUS, US-Japan-South Korea cooperation, and other trilateral and bilateral arrangements all point to that path.
4. Could NATO-like organizations be established on different continents in the future? How do you assess this possibility?
They could, but NATO is unusually hard to reproduce. NATO grew out of a particular historical experience – a relatively clear external threat, strong political convergence among its members, sustained US involvement, integrated military structures and a credible collective-defence guarantee backed by conventional and nuclear capabilities. Many regions lack one or more of those ingredients. Countries may agree they face security challenges without agreeing on which threat matters most, whether they’d fight on one another’s behalf, or who should lead. So I expect more regional security cooperation ahead, but not necessarily more NATO or application of the NATO model. What’s more likely is flexible coalitions, minilateral groupings, bilateral alliances and issue-specific arrangements that overlap with one another. The Indo-Pacific may end up the clearest example of this. Rather than an “Asian NATO,” what seems to be emerging is a networked security architecture in which different groups of countries cooperate on different problems. NATO can connect to that architecture without becoming its centre or extending its own geographical mandate into Asia.
