Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida returned to Washington DC for the second time this year to attend the 75^th anniversary of the NATO Summit as one of four critical U.S. allies in Indo-Pacific—known as “IP4”—along with his counterparts from Australia, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea (ROK).  During his brief visit, Kishida had a whirlwind schedule that included the summit meeting among NATO and IP4 countries, a separate IP4 leaders’ meeting, and a host of bilateral meetings with his European counterparts. 

This week’s summit took place as Russia’s war against Ukraine drags on while Russia’s “arms-for-food-and-technology” rapprochement with North Korea takes shape. This is also the first NATO Summit where the leaders discussed the security threat from China as its own problem.  For the first time in NATO’s history, the Washington Summit Declaration explicitly stated that “[t]he People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.  The deepening strategic partnership between Russia and the PRC and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut and reshape the rules-based international order, are a cause for profound concern”, while calling out Beijing as “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine”.  

From Tokyo’s perspective, though, the Summit was a culmination of Kishida’s effort in pursing the convergence of strategic interests among U.S. partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.  Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, Kishida rallied the countries in the Indo-Pacific region with the mantra, “Today’s Ukraine can be tomorrow’s East Asia” to encourage them to consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as their own security concern in his effort to shore up their support for Ukraine. NATO’s open acknowledgement of the gravity of security challenge posted by China during this Summit brought his effort full circle. 

That said, the influence that NATO can actually provide during a future crisis in Indo-Pacific would be limited.  What IP4 countries are providing in support of Ukraine—bilateral direct assistance to Ukraine, as well as assistance through NATO by financial contribution to the Trust Fund—will likely be the most that the Indo-Pacific region could expect from NATO in the time of contingencies. 

Nonetheless, there is much that NATO and IP4 can cooperate in to build and maintain mutually-reinforced peacetime deterrence.  In addition to the ongoing effort to expand the opportunities for joint exercises, the areas of cooperation that have been identified—cyber, counter-disinformation, technology—are all common transnational threats. Better preparedness across these areas of cooperation can go a long way in enhancing the collective capacity of the IP4 partnership and the NATO alliance, writ large. 

Given the reality that all the U.S. allies share the concern about the stability of U.S. leadership beyond 2024, institutionalizing cooperation among U.S. allies between Europe and Indo-Pacific may also serve as a “safety net” that would enable them to prepare for potential unpredictability in U.S. leadership – as well as growing concerns of a future U.S. withdrawal from multilateral institutions like NATO.