At last year's Nato Summit in Madrid, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canada's Justin Trudeau. Photo / Katie Scotcher, Pool
When China last week expressed disapproval about Japan’s Prime Minister attending the upcoming Nato summit in Europe, it may have forgotten that the leaders of New Zealand, Australia and South Korea would be there as well.
The four countries are all partners of Nato (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) from the Asia Pacific region or, as the US prefers to reference, the wider Indo-Pacific, and are informally described as the IP4.
The IP4 grouping of Nato’s regional partners is a convenient way to discuss increasingly important developments in the region, be it through officials, ambassadors, defence ministers or foreign ministers or leaders.
It also undoubtedly reinforces a more collective sense of security in a region where superpower rivalry between the United States and China and growing.
Japan is considered the most enthusiastic Nato partner to the extent that it is discussing setting up a Nato liaison office in Tokyo next year, a move which China has also condemned.
“The Asia-Pacific lies beyond the geographical scope of the North Atlantic,” Chinese foreign affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning said last week. “Nato’s attempt to make eastward inroads into the Asia-Pacific will inevitably undermine regional peace and stability.
“Japan needs to …avoid doing things that may erode the trust between countries and undermine peace and stability in the region,” she said.
It is likely to be one of the issues canvassed this weekend at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, along with tensions around Taiwan, contested space in the South China Sea, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear submarines from the United States and Britain.
The Shangri-La Dialogue brings together defence ministers, military leaders and security specialists every year to discuss regional security, and is organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
It is one of the forums from which China is not excluded and its Minister of National Defence, Li Shangfu, will be speaking on Sunday.
US Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin will speak on Saturday and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will speak on Friday.
Li has declined a formal meeting with Austin, the South China Morning Post has reported, on the grounds that sanctions on him imposed by the US in 2018 for overseeing an arms purchase from Russia remain in place.
Defence Minister Andrew Little is heading to Singapore for the conference and among those he is expected to formally meet are Li Shangfu and Little’s counterpart from Japan, Yasukaza Hamada, who is leading a huge boost in military spending.
New Zealand maintains a strategic defence dialogue with China at officials level and the 11th took place earlier in May at Xi’an. Among the IP4, New Zealand is the only one that is not a formal defence ally of the United States.
Nato will be represented in Singapore at a high level, although Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg won’t be there because he will be preparing for the Nato in Lithuania in July. It will be attended by Albanese, Japan’s Fumio Kishida, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
IISS executive director for Asia James Crabtree said Nato was “feeling its way” in Asia and dismissed any suggestion the alliance would be setting up in the Indo Pacific. But speaking to the Straits Times’ podcast Speaking of Asia, he said there was a lot of interest in Nato, as the gold standard in military operations.
There was interest in its advanced joint operations, about what it knew about cyber, satellites, space and long-range strike capability.
New Zealand’s relationship with Nato was largely shaped during the war in Afghanistan when Nato led the International Security Assistance Force from 2003 to 2014 and then the Resolute Support Mission to train and support Afghan forces from 2015 to 2021.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year has shown that events happening 17,000 km away, can have profound effects on other parts of the world.
The fact is that of the six non-Nato countries that are helping Ukraine, four of them are the IP4. The other two are Singapore and Taiwan. And the common values between Nato countries and New Zealand was a strong link, Little suggested last week.
“The reality is that some of the issues that Nato is dealing with and Europe is dealing with are issues that aren’t confined to them and to their region,” Little told the Herald.
“They are issues of values and principles and international diplomacy and law and things we have an interest in too.
“If you look at Nato’s role in terms of Ukraine at the moment, they know and Europe knows that that conflict is not and should not be seen as theirs alone.”
New Zealand has offered humanitarian assistance, training to Ukraine forces in Britain, and funding for weapons and ammunition as well as sanctions against Russia’s political and military leaders.
“We all have an interest in making sure that Russia doesn’t get away with an unprovoked incursion into another territory, which is why we are there,” said Little.
“We have a role in that and to the extent that Nato has the role they do in that region, it’s in our interests to support them when they are dealing with conflicts that are an affront to our values too.”
He also suggested that any conflict in the Asia Pacific could receive reciprocal support from Nato.
“We would be reliant on partners from around the world to assist and Nato might be one of those.”
Nato is becoming more focused on the military expansion of China in the region, despite Nato being a collective security alliance between the United States, Canada, Britain and 28 European countries.
China was written into Nato’s 10-year Strategic Concept in ominous terms, a 13-page document that was adopted at the Madrid summit last year.
“The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values,” the Strategic Concept said.
“The PRC employs a broad range of political, economic and military tools to increase its global footprint and project power, while remaining opaque about its strategy, intentions and military build-up.
“PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security. The PRC seeks to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains.
“It uses its economic leverage to create strategic dependencies and enhance its influence. It strives to subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains…”
It also mentions the “deepening strategic partnership” between China and Russia “and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”
A more detailed 96-page document about China and the Indo-Pacific, Regional Perspectives Report on the Indo-Pacific, was released after the leaders’ summit last year.
It says the increasing number of defence partnerships and the constant rising of defence budgets “will convert the Indo-Pacific into the most militarised area of the world.”
It said Nato’s obligation was to support partners and help protect common values and the rules-based international order.
“Conversely, Nato’s active military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, rooted from this obligation, could spark more competition and escalate the deterrence posture in the future.”
Mirna Galic, a senior policy analyst for China and East Asia at the US Institute of Peace, held meetings in New Zealand recently to discuss the IP4.
She believed the informality of the IP4 suited both Nato and the regional partners because of its flexibility. And she did not believe there was any move to make it more formal.
“It is entirely possible that at some point in the future, that may be decided depending on interests.,” she told the Herald.
“But at this moment in time, there is no interest from either Nato or the partners in formalising that relationship.”
Nato’s interest in the region was manifested primarily by its engagement with the partners in the region and those relationships preceded Nato’s interest in China.
“It is much more diverse and varied than just being about China,” she said, citing its role in Afghanistan and its interest in North Korea.
In fact the first meeting of what is now known as the IP4 occurred in 2016 to talk about North Korea.
In 2020 Nato met with the foreign ministers of the four countries, and with the defence ministers in 2022 not long before the leaders summit in Madrid, which the four IP4 leaders first attended.
There had been a real uptick in the level of engagement by Nato as a group since 2019, said Galic.
“In some ways this makes a lot of sense,” she said at a roundtable at Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies. “From Nato’s perspective it wants to get insights into the region. These are the four major partners in the region. It is simply easier to talk to them all at once.”
And the partners were the most coherent group among Nato’s partners across the globe: they all had militaries that were subject to civilian rule, they all had good human rights records, they were all democracies and they were all treaty allies or strong partners of the United States.
“There’s a lot of commonality that they have which makes them a good informal grouping for Nato.”
Minister Louise Upston has directed her officials to stop publishing weekly updates.