Is America Ready For An Asian NATO?
By
Douglas Bulloch
Published
1 day ago
Asian NATO Coming Soon?
To securocrats the world over NATO has a formidable reputation. Having faced down the Soviet menace in the Cold War, for a time it became a powerful instrument of U.S. and Western foreign policy objectives. Though the organization speaks of values and maintains a defensive posture, the reason East European countries rushed to join it was because NATO put the ‘hard’ into ‘hard power’. It is no wonder, therefore, that when people speak of new defensive arrangements in Asia to manage China’s rise, NATO is the exemplar they all reach for, or the crafting of a so-called Asian NATO.
The difficulty faced when transposing a Cold War bastion onto the complex and developing political topology of the Indo-Pacific, however, is getting the shoe to fit.
NATO in this context represents that rare thing, an international organization that worked. Beyond that, it is widely misunderstood. Most comparisons focus on the kind of organization NATO is today, and suggest that although some of what it does might usefully translate into the region, it’s hard to build an alliance that dense and hierarchical without clearer strategic alignment. This would certainly be a challenge but one which could resolve itself as the political rivalries condense out of the fog of strategic competition. Instead, the real problem lies in U.S. strategic confusion.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/01/is-america-ready-for-an-asian-nato/
