A former Assistant Secretary of Defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration recently called for a collective defence pact in Asia that ‘would bind those countries that are currently most aligned and prepared to take on the China challenge together: Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States’, potentially more at a later stage [1]. According to that proposal, the pact would contain a mutually beneficial collective security clause, guaranteeing reciprocity of commitments advantageous even to the United States. In 2024, Japan’s Prime Minister, Ishiba Shigeru, too, suggested an ‘Asian NATO’ was desirable [2]. That declaration was in sharp contrast with Japan’s foreign policy since 2006, albeit Ishiba made it when he was not yet Prime minister or head of the majority. It is unlikely that any such alliance will appear. One needs to ask why and what may happen instead.

 

In the 1990s a host of papers were written on Asian regionalism positing that ASEAN would eventually resemble the EU in its level of integration. ASEAN never became the EU because South-East Asian states found a better and more suitable alternative. It is similarly unlikely that there will be a NATO-style alliance in the Indo-Pacific, if by alliance one means a collective security arrangement binding states in a reciprocal agreement to come to each other’s rescue. Yet, the question of a Pacific Alliance or Asian NATO raises two important points. First, it suggests that existing US alliances with regional partners include no reciprocity. Second, it calls for a regional alliance. Yet, as for the former, existing US alliances in the region do include reciprocity clauses. As for the latter, a regional alliance is precisely what the region’s states do not want. However, other forms of cooperation are being countenanced, tailored to regional concerns. This kind of cooperation is likely to develop further in lieu of an alliance. This article proceeds to explain how.

 

Let us address reciprocity in the commitments. The US’s diverse alliance treaties contain reciprocal assistance clauses precisely because the 11 June 1948 Vandenberg resolution of the US Senate prohibits the US president from entering security agreements which do not include them. The Compacts of Free Association with the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau are broader in nature and more than ‘arrangements for individual and collective self-defence’. The US does ensure their defence, but gains from them as much as it provides, albeit under a different form. Japan benefited from an imbalance in the mutual contributions under the 1952 San Francisco security treaty in not making a contribution to US security, other than by allowing the US to keep on using its numerous bases and by contributing to their costs. This also supported regional security and US strategy and wars in Asia. Under the 1960 Security treaty, each party recognised that ‘an attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan [ie, the US bases] would be dangerous to its own peace and safety’. Japan’s Self-Defence Forces at the time could not be deployed overseas. The subsequent broadening of Japan’s defence doctrine and law has meant that Japan has defended more than ‘the territories under [its] administration’ for decades, albeit in a modest way. Japan first announced a willingness to patrol the high seas in the 1980s. It invoked the Japan-US alliance to demonstrate solidarity with the US in sending its Self-Defence Forces to the Indian Ocean (2001) and to Iraq (2004), way beyond ‘the Far East’. Since 2014 Japan can exercise collective self-defence if ‘its existential interests’ are under threat as a result of an attack on an ally or partner. As the US continues, for the present, to provide a ‘nuclear umbrella’ to Japan, Japan could invoke its ‘existential interests’ were the US attacked. The alliance was declared ‘global’ in 2015. Today Japan is the US’s partner, which has gone farthest in rebalancing reciprocity since the original 1952 treaty. Other US security treaties are more forthright, containing an explicit collective security clause: the ANZUS Treaty (1951, art. 4), which still binds Australia and the United States, the US-South Korea treaty (1953, art. 3), the US-Philippines Treaty (1954, art. 4). 

 

Given the breadth and endurance of existing alliances, why no Pacific Alliance? 

 

 

According to Weber[3], the power disparity between Asian states and the US was too important. According to Ikenberry[4], multilateralism was more efficient in Europe and not necessary in Asia. To Hemmer and Katzenstein (2022), US perceptions of collective identities [5] lead the US to opt for a series of treaties. Others have offered a political psychology explanation[6]: threat perceptions differed.

 

There may be a more simple level of explanation involving Asian states themselves today for why there is still no Asian NATO-type multilateral binding alliance. Alliances have benefits and costs. Signing up to a collective security clause would mean accepting that in principle the threat an ally faces can pose such a grave threat to oneself that one may compromise one’s peace to help end or avenge it. To accept to bind their autonomy thus, Asian countries would require overwhelming and converging external and internal incentives. 

 

An alliance depends on an external dynamic. The sense of urgency was great in Europe prior to NATO’s creation in 1949 after the 1948 Prague Coup, the division of Germany and the Berlin airlift in 1949. The 1947 Franco-British Dunkirk treaty was followed by the 1948 Brussels treaty, which culminated in the 1949 Washington Treaty, an alliance predicated on the Soviet threat. It could appear because all Western European states shared the same sense of urgency and danger and knew they would be doomed without solidarity. China is far more subtle than the Soviet Union –  using what experts call ‘grey-zone tactics’, never really provoking, trespassing, yet steadily gaining ground to the extent that it now claims the whole South China Sea, and part of the East China Sea extending into Japanese territory. Yet, Asian states do not want to provoke it. Indeed most have made concessions to China in adhering to the One-China principle. Malaysia recently altered its position on Taiwan in ceasing to mention the need for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

 

Apart from this external dynamic, an unfaltering internal dynamic is also required. Yet one sees Asian states divided internally over the course to take in their relations with their neighbors. South Korea and Japan should jointly push back Chinese incursions. They don’t. They could address together the issue of North Korean kidnapped citizens – they don’t. Cooperation has made some progress, but the solution found on ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for wartime sex workers) in 2015 with South Korean President Park Gun-he did not suit her successor. The intelligence exchange pact she had signed was likewise temporarily suspended in 2019. Former president Yoon Suk-yeol’s solution for compensation of ‘slaved laborers’ may not suit his successor, to be elected in June. The Philippines’ China policy may falter again if President Ferdinand Marcos Jr loses power. 

 

A difficulty all Asian countries share is China, but all agree that Chinese economic power and their interdependence with China, makes any hardening of their positions a costly solution. China suspended ‘rare earths’ exports to Japan in 2010. It adopted sanctions against Australia in 2019 – albeit ineffectual. Countries will not antagonise China when their social stability depends on trade with China or on Chinese investments. Even in Australia, where the relationship with the US is valued, being a US ally raises doubts and debate, illustrated following the signing of AUKUS in 2021 and reflected in recent books[7].

 

Furthermore, one may question the adequacy of an alliance like NATO in an Asian context. It has been deployed in numerous war zones – which Asian states are not keen on doing. ASEAN states would not consider troop deployment for instance against Myanmar’s junta as NATO countries did elsewhere. Getting involved in other states’ internal affairs and provoking regime change is something the West feels authorised to do. NATO is also supposed to be in itself an effective deterrent. If that were the case, it should have deterred the 2022 Russian aggression against Ukraine which threatened NATO members. Clearly NATO can’t serve as model. NATO could not push back Russia because of its dependence on Russian hydrocarbons (45% of the EU’s gas supplies, 50% of its coal imports came from Russia). The nuclear weapon was Europeans’ alibi not to act.

 

Consequently, there is no NATO at this stage in Asia because Asian states have the cooperation they require given their perceived level of threat. Middle-power cooperation is more promising. Much of it has been taking place through minilaterals, a form of cooperation, which has thrived in the Indo-Pacific.

 

Instead of a formal alliance, what has been created in the Indo-Pacific under Japan’s discreet guidance and patient craftsmanship, is a web of relations, which partly overlap and strengthen each other. Since 2005, Japan has been building the capacity of its Maritime South East Asian neighbours’ cost guards. Since 2015 under a new instrument, ‘official security assistance’, it has provided military materiel to maritime South East Asian countries armed forces. In 2014, it relaxed its arms exports restrictions to be able to sell defensive weapons systems to those countries. It revamped the semi-defunct Quad in 2017. With its Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy (2016) and through the Hiroshima G7 summit, it sought to connect with the Global South and Developing countries, bringing the Indo-Pacific to life geopolitically, providing new instruments for international cooperation, raising awareness of the Global South in the West. Meanwhile, it fostered relations with Australia and the United Kingdom that are quasi-alliances. Australia too developed bilateral cooperation and capacity-building assistance with maritime South East Asian nations, and undertook to strengthen its position as security provider in the South Pacific with the occasional assistance of Japan, France or the United States. Australia and Japan’s diplomacies converge and strengthen each other, hence their strong bilateral relationship, which their strong tie to the US consolidates.

 

What might happen to bilateral, mini, multilateral cooperation in the region under the Trump administration? Thus far we have heard nothing pointing to an American disengagement from the Indo-Pacific, which was the main focus of the Trump One administration. The US still participates in multilateral military exercises in the region. The US is likely to remain in Quad. Trilaterals have emerged with the US - such as between the Philippines-Japan-the US, Japan-Australia-the US, Japan-South Korea-the US - or without it. For instance, France and Australia have been cooperating with third countries in the South Pacific in training their police forces.

 

One can see how, in the future, the Indo-Pacific dots could be joined. For instance, AUKUS, should it remain, could join with the Quad or the web of cooperation with countries concerned with deterring China while not alienating it. Some European countries too could become more involved in that cooperation. Better than a collective security clause, Asia needs greater cohesion, determination and preparedness to provide a strong collective deterrent along with increased defence budgets – this too is applicable to NATO countries. The transfer of social spending and debt servicing to productive spending, such as innovation, new technologies, including an energy transition that does not create further dependence on China, is key to deterring China, for Japan and NATO countries alike. France and the UK should use their Francophonie and Commonwealth networks to work with the Global South (ill-defined as the term is) rather than to maintain their former grandeur. There is an abiding need for increased cooperation among middle powers not least between NATO or its members, and Indo-Pacific partners. Tighter cooperation is the prerequisite to counterbalance, contain, deter Chinese power. But there will not be a Pacific Alliance like NATO: Asia is engaged in a more subtle enterprise. 

[1]Ely Ratner, ‘The Case for a Pacific Defense Pact. America Needs a New Asian Alliance to Counter China’, Foreign Affairs, May 27, 2025.
[2]‘Shigeru Ishiba on Japan’s New Security Era: The Future of Japan’s Foreign Policy’, The Hudson Institute, 25 Sept. 2024.
[3] Steve Weber (1992), ‘Shaping the postwar balance of power: Multilateralism in NATO’ International Organization 46(3): 634–680.
[4] G. John Ikenberry (2003), ‘State power and the institutional bargain: America’s ambivalent economic and security multilateralism.’  In: Foot R, MacFarlane SN and Mastanduno M (eds), US Hegemony and International Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 49–70.
[5] Christopher Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein (2002) Why is there no NATO in Asia? Collective identity, regional­ism, and the origins of multilateralism. International Organization 56(3): 575–607.
[6] He Kai and Feng Huiyun (2012). 'Why is there no NATO in Asia?': Revisited: Prospect theory, balance of threat, and US alliance strategies. European Journal of International Relations, 18(2), 227-250.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066110377124
[7] Allan Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World since 1942. Carlton: La Trobe University Press, 2018, 419. Emma Shortis, Our Exceptional Friend, Melbourne : Hardie Grant Publishing, 2021, 288. Clinton Fernandes, Sub-imperial Power, Melbourne : Melbourne University Publishing, 2022, 176.