NATO's Pivot to the East: Motives and Problems

Abstract

The article examines such a new phenomenon in world geopolitics as NATO's desire to expand its activities to the Asia-Pacific region. Along with Washington, in recent years, Western European states have been showing increasing concerns about China's growing economic and military relations, seeing it as a threat to their interests not only in the field of economics and technology, but increasingly in the field of security. China's economic, technological, and military-political ambitions are traditionally of particular concern to neighboring Japan. Promoting the idea of the indivisibility of the security of the Indo-Pacific and European regions, Tokyo intends to involve a number of European states in the geopolitical plan to contain China, despite the fact that geographically they are on the opposite side of the planet from China. The NATO leadership, which shares the concept of the indivisibility of the security of the two regions, in its own doctrinal documents, along with Russia, also brings China to the forefront as a threat to its security. In the Asia-Pacific region, NATO intends to strengthen security relations with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. However, the coincidence of the interests of Japan and Western European states in containing the "rising China" makes Japan actually the main conductor of the expansion of NATO's activities in the Asia-Pacific region. At the NATO summit in Vilnius in 2023, Japan and the North Atlantic Alliance agreed on a document outlining 16 areas of cooperation until 2026. NATO's pivot to the Asian East causes wariness not only in Beijing and Moscow, but also in a number of Asia-Pacific countries. Critics of NATO's advance into Asia fear that it could lead to increased tension and destabilization in the field of regional security.