This US general says an Asia-Pacific NATO would help him sleep at night

A top Chinese general recently accused the United States of a hidden agenda to create a version of NATO in the Asia-Pacific, and now a senior American officer has welcomed the idea.

As the number of Asia-Pacific security arrangements has been increasing year by year, China’s Lieutenant General Jing Jianfeng told the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this month: “The true motive of the US is to converge small circles into a big circle, that is an Asian-Pacific version of NATO, to maintain the US-led hegemony.”

Royal Australian Navy ships during the Rim of the Pacific exercise in 2022.Credit: ADF

Jiang, deputy chief of China’s Joint Staff Department at the Central Military Commission of the People’s Liberation Army, said Washington was “tying the region’s countries to the US war chariot”.

In response, America’s Lieutenant General Stephen Sklenka said he would “sleep better at night” if there were a NATO-type collective defence treaty in the region, but that no such plans were afoot.

The Chinese Communist Party should “look in the mirror” and ask why countries in the region were forming new partnerships with each other but not with Beijing, said Sklenka.

“If it didn’t notice, none of these countries are running to the Chinese to look for partnerships,” he said, because the region was “nervous” about China’s intentions.

Asked whether a collective defence treaty between the US and its Indo-Pacific allies was conceivable or desirable, Sklenka told this masthead: “Those of us at Indopacom would sleep better at night if we had something like a NATO out here, but that’s not happening.

“But my retort to that is no, instead of castigating those relationships, the Chinese should probably look in the mirror and ask themselves why have these arrangements come into fruition.

“Why did the Quad [a security dialogue embracing the US, India, Japan and Australia] come into play? Because these countries are nervous, they’re nervous about the direction the CCPs going,” said Sklenka, a US Marines officer and the deputy commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, the largest of the US regional commands. He was in Australia as the 2024 Australian-American Leadership Dialogue scholar.

The US has no collective military alliance in Asia like the 32-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Instead, it maintains a series of alliances, a so-called “hub and spoke” set-up. These include defence treaties with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand.

But as China’s territorial ambition has grown and the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency looms, countries in the Indo-Pacific have banded together in a range of new or enlarged defensive arrangements. Most, but not all, include the US.

The US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, told the Shangri-La Dialogue that Washington recently “secured a series of historic agreements with our allies and partners to transform our force posture throughout the Indo-Pacific”.

US, Japanese and South Korean forces were training together in “unprecedented” ways, he said. And this was “just a starting point”, Austin added. Regional nations were engineering a historic “convergence” of their defence interests by creating a “set of overlapping and complementary initiatives and institutions”, he said.

Sklenka said in the interview that recent Chinese military manoeuvres against the Australian navy in international waters were “aggressive actions against you, but it’s not just against you – it’s against the entire system [of rules] and that’s why it concerns so many people. I’m not entirely sure the PLA truly understands this”.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.