Keating’s right, NATO should steer clear of the Indo-Pacific

When Paul Keating made his latest intemperate intervention on international affairs at the time of the recent NATO summit in Vilnius, the sheer savagery of his language caught the public’s attention. NATO, he said, was a “poison” and its greatly respected secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, a “supreme fool”. Even among Keating’s dwindling band of admirers there may have been a twinge of regretful pity for a hero who had so obviously degenerated into a ranting, King Lear-like figure.

Which is a shame because the attention-getting verbal pyrotechnics distracted from the larger point that Keating was seeking to make: that we should be very careful about the relationship between NATO and the Indo-Pacific. And that extending the alliance to our region would be a serious mistake. About that, Keating was right.

Paul Keating’s sledging of NATO was over the top, but his central objections were valid.Credit:

Not that extending NATO beyond the Euro-Atlantic is being seriously considered by Australian ministers and policymakers. Nevertheless, there is increasingly loose talk about the idea, particularly in the United States. Last week, two US senators canvassed the possibility. Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, was quoted as saying that the expansion of NATO into the Indo-Pacific “had already started [with the] AUKUS agreement”. Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, was quoted as describing the expansion as “inevitable”.

These are relatively junior senators, however they both sit on the powerful Senate armed services committee. Their linkage of AUKUS with NATO expansion reflected a serious misconception of AUKUS’s nature and purpose. Nevertheless, their observations are typical of a growing volume of poorly thought-through commentary about the nature of NATO’s role in the Indo-Pacific. Much of this talk is driven by glib and oversimplified comparisons between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s declared intentions in relation to Taiwan.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the French president’s wife, Brigitte Macron, and French President Emmanuel Macron at the NATO summit.Credit: Reuters

French President Emmanuel Macron scotched the suggestion – supported by the US – that one of the outcomes of Vilnius should be the establishment of a NATO liaison office in Japan. The presence at the NATO summit of the four Pacific nations with which the US has security treaties – Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand – has been mistaken by some commentators, and evidently by Keating himself, as an early step towards NATO’s expansion into our region. That is a misinterpretation of events, and certainly an eventuality that Australia and New Zealand do not favour.

Without doubt, there is today a much greater recognition of mutual interests between the liberal democracies of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific. This is the case not only in the co-ordination of strategic policy, but in trade as well. For instance, the United Kingdom has just become the first non-Pacific member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. (The CPTPP was originally just the “TPP” until the addition of two meaningless adjectives was required, for no sensible reason, as part of the deal to bring Canada back into the tent after it threatened to walk – one of the endless examples of Justin Trudeau’s fondness for rhetoric over substance.)

Greater strategic integration – a necessary and inevitable development – is very different from expanding NATO’s coverage to our region. There are several reasons why that is not the right way to deal with the complexities of Indo-Pacific diplomacy and strategic policy.

First, it ignores the entirely different power balances between our region and the Euro-Atlantic. Following the Second World War and the descent of the Iron Curtain, the European continent was divided into two clear blocs. Although a few European nations were not members of either NATO or the Warsaw Pact (for instance, Austria, Switzerland and Yugoslavia), the overwhelming majority were. Following the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, the former Warsaw Pact nations, as well as the Baltic states liberated from Soviet captivity, rightly perceived that their future security could not be chanced on the continuation of glasnost and perestroika, and so sought NATO membership. The events of the past 18 months on Russia’s southern border show how right they were to have done so.

In the Indo-Pacific, there is no such geopolitical binary. Neither India nor Indonesia – the largest regional players besides China – would support, let alone participate in, a NATO-style alliance, nor would any of the south-east Asian or South Pacific nations. Not even the most pro-Western of the south-east Asian nations, Singapore, would be interested. All of these countries seek to manage their relationships both with China and the West; the most likely effect of an unwelcome NATO expansion would be to strengthen China’s hand.

This would also unsettle the existing complex regional architecture. The Quad – Australia, India, Japan, and the US – is not, and was never intended to be a proto-NATO. It would be entirely unacceptable to the nations of ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum.

And what would we be defending? The dangers of regional disruption come primarily from China’s unlawful claims in the south and east China Seas, and its threats against Taiwan. Yet Taiwan – not claiming to be an independent nation and not recognised as the government of China by a single NATO state – could not be a member. The four Pacific nations that attended the Vilnius Summit already have their own security pacts with the US. In the case of the ANZUS Treaty, that includes a defence guarantee analogous with Article 5 of NATO’s foundational document, the North Atlantic Treaty.

The closer convergence of the NATO nations and Indo-Pacific democracies will continue, with greater recognition of their mutual strategic and trading interests, and ever-growing military co-operation – of which AUKUS is a prime example. That is not the same thing as the creation of an Indo-Pacific NATO presence, as Keating seems to think. Yet his larger point is right. It’s just a shame it got lost in an angry rant.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor in the practice of national security at the ANU’s National Security College.

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