Concurrently with the drills in Belarus, Chinese Navy conducted maritime exercises in Taiwan Strait, having violated the island’s airspace a record number of times. And earlier this week, Russia joined China in live-fire naval exercises in the South China Sea.
We tend to forget just how closely intertwined the Chinese and Russian state – symbolically and politically. The two powers have conducted numerous military exercises with Russia. Most of the land drills in recent years, the so-called “Peace Missions”, occurred in either Russia, China or other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation states, aimed at suppressing social uprisings or major insurgencies. Joint Sino-Russian exercises were also conducted in maritime and aerospace, limited predominantly to the Far East, with one exclusion of naval drills in the Baltic Sea in 2017.
All this matters because China has kept a perceived “impartiality” over the war in Ukraine, calling both parties for peace. But while it hasn’t been directly sending mass numbers of weapons to Russia (like, for example, Iran or North Korea), China has nonetheless been supplying Russia with critical resources for its war effort in the form of dual use tech, while bankrolling Russia’s war economy through purchases of oil and gas sanctioned by the West.
Japan, a guest at this year’s Nato Summit, while in talks of opening a Nato liaison office in Tokyo, issued a warning about China’s escalatory moves in the region. According to Japan’s recently published Defence White Paper, China plans to double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. It also mentions North Korea as a growing risk factor, with attempts to boost its nuclear strike capability and missile range to have the capacity to reach as far as the US. In June, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defence pledge deal that binds the two countries in any military altercations.
This unholy axis is creating extraordinary security threats that will change the world as we know it. European allies on the Eastern flank of Nato, according to sources in their governments, are considering obtaining a shared nuclear arsenal as a deterrent in an increasingly uncertain world, especially with the US becoming more isolationist. This could lead to an unprecedented shift towards wider proliferation as a similar process takes place in the Middle East.
As Nato celebrated being the most successful military-political alliance in the world’s history earlier this month, the interconnectedness of global threats and indivisibility of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-pacific security went through every statesman’s and woman’s speech as a thin thread. Nato’s umbrella can no longer be limited to the North-Atlantic and inviting the four powers of Indo-Pacific – Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia – shows that understanding.
In its final statement, Nato reprimanded China for its expansive behavior and for aiding Russia. But statements need to be followed by actions. Re-establishing peace can only be achieved through the exertion of strength by 32 allies united by a shared vision. This should define the next 75 years of Nato.
Aliona Hlivco is Managing Director of the Henry Jackson Society, a trans-Atlantic foreign policy and national security think tank.
She is a regular contributor to The Telegraph’s daily podcast ‘Ukraine: The Latest’, including our most recent episode. With over 85 million downloads, it is considered the most trusted daily source of war news on both sides of the Atlantic.