European bloc’s security update includes warning for Australia

NATO fears China will use its alliance of convenience with Russia to not only fund the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine but further expand plans in the Pacific.

Russia has become China’s biggest oil supplier as the two super powers forge an alliance of convenience against the West.

China has now emerged as the leading financier of Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, buying Russia’s heavily discounted oil reserves that combined with India, is seeing 2.4 million barrels of Russian crude a day being sold.

But NATO leaders and diplomats and other world leaders including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meeting in Madridon Tuesday fear the Chinese indirect funding of the conflict is part of a broader security threat that includes the Indo-Pacific region.

The threat is expected to lead to a reworking and broadening of NATO’s operating document to recognise the expansionist ambitions of both Russia and China including coercive economic practices.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie Haydon board the plane to Europe where he will attend a NATO Leaders Summit. Source: Prime Minister's Office

It is this expansion that sees nations from outside NATO including Australia, Japan and South Korea invited to attend the critical summit and endorse new security protocols.

That threat view has hardened with the renewed rhetoric on the weekend from Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he decried what he sees as a US-led hegemony and a Cold War mentality which he urged world leaders to move away from.

He said Western sanctions had weaponised the global economy and “would boomerang” against those who support them.

The meeting of the often fractious 30-member NATO alliance will identify China for the first time in a strategic document, hardening a stance against China’s push into the Indo Pacific and Africa.

Leaders of the G7 group of nations are officially coming together under the motto: "progress towards an equitable world". Picture: Stefan Rousseau /Getty Images

The document, known as the Strategic Concept, is NATO’s most important working document after the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, which contained the key provision holding that an attack on one member is viewed as an attack upon all.

The security assessment is updated roughly every decade to reset the West’s security agenda.

Australian Defence College’s Centre for Defence Studies senior fellow Dr Matthew Sussex said while the Russia-China alliance was interesting, the world was not yet seeing a new axis of evil.

“They’ve got very different interests and Russia is the junior partner in all of this and it doesn’t like it,” he said.

Ukrainian experts work outside a damaged residential building hit by Russian missiles in Kyiv. Picture: Sergei Supinsky

“It’s interesting in terms of where China is at they have certainly boosted Russian rhetoric and propaganda and said comforting things to Moscow but they’ve done virtually nothing. They said ‘OK we are going to freeze investment loans into both Russia and Ukraine … they are not doing precision guided missiles not selling them those, not selling them chips, all the sorts of things the Russians need they are not providing.

“The Chinese want the war to go on because it will weaken Russia.”

He said the Ukraine conflict had entered a phase of attrition with Russia resorting to its old playbook of heavy bombardment and advance strategy, a fight Ukraine cannot win without heavy artillery.

Russian President Vladimir Putin makes a toast as he takes part in the XIV BRICS summit in virtual format via a video call with China and India. Picture: AFP

But China has been content to watch from the sidelines and has learnt in the short term it does not need to invade Taiwan.

“Putin is counting on the West will fold in terms of help for Ukraine and I think the Chinese calculation will be ‘why attempt a very, very difficult maritime assault on Taiwan and gamble on whether America and its allies comes to help come to help or not; might as well wait them out and fragment them’. That makes conflict (in the Pacific) less likely in the short term.”

Originally published as European bloc’s security update includes warning for Australia