In Conversation with Peter Olive and John Hemmings

Why should NATO members care about the Indo-Pacific region?

The following conversation was recorded in October 2024 and has been edited for clarity.

Rick Landgraf: Welcome back to the Ties That Bind, NATO at 75 and Beyond, a special podcast series of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I'm your host, Rick Landgraf. Today, we are talking about NATO's activities and focus on the Indo-Pacific region, why the region is important to the NATO allies, which countries are NATO partners in the region, what NATO aims to achieve through such partnerships, and what is NATO's role in the increasing competition between the United States and China.

My first guest is Peter Olive. Peter is a former senior officer in the United Kingdom Royal Navy with extensive policy and operational experience in both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic.

Peter is now a senior adjunct fellow at the Honolulu-based Think Tank Pacific Forum, where his work focuses on the link between Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security. Peter is also a senior advisor at the London-based strategic intelligence firm, Herminius. Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Olive: Thanks for having me.

RL: My second guest is Dr. John Hemmings. John is a Senior Associate Director for the Pacific Forum. He is an expert on alliances in the region and has lectured and designed research programs that connect Euro-Atlantic security with the Indo-Pacific.

In 2023, his research on Hawaii's exclusion from the NATO defense obligations was picked up by a number of prominent media sources, including Newsweek and CNN. John, thanks for joining us.

John Hemmings: Thanks for having me.

RL: John, I'd like to start with you today. So NATO is an alliance in an international organization that comprises 32 member states across North America and Europe. It has core responsibilities, which include crisis management, collective security, and above all, territorial defense of NATO territory in North America and Europe. So why then should NATO care about the Indo-Pacific region?

JH: Thank you, Rick. It's a great question. And I think it's probably the fundamental question for today's discussion. What are the interests for the Indo-Pacific region, which seems to many Europeans so far away from the sort of core area of responsibility for the alliance?

I'd start with the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has really, in the eyes of many in both regions, solidified the idea that the two regions are connected and that what happens in one region is important to another region. Secondly, the United States, a core preeminent member of NATO, has deep equities in security and maintaining security and peace in the region.

And if that country goes to war, that has a knock-on effect with the other NATO members. So whether or not they abstain from that conflict, they cannot help but be affected by it. And then third, more getting to the core national interest of European member states and even North American member states like Canada, the technology goods coming out of the Indo-Pacific region are so significant—the semiconductor global supply chain from Korea and Taiwan, for example, is a massive part of that. The European trade going through the South China Sea is something like 40 percent, according to the Center for International Security Studies, a Washington think tank.

And so I think, it wouldn't seem apparent that there are clear equities for NATO in the Indo-Pacific. And it's not to say that NATO needs to be in the Indo-Pacific, but the question is, if we just take a step back and say, what are the interests and why should NATO care? I think laying out those three is pretty significant.

RL: Peter, do you have anything to add to that?

PO: Yeah, I'd agree with all that. If you look at the 2022 declaration of the People's Republic of China as a strategic challenger, that would have been unthinkable the year before. So clearly the member states of NATO are noting the deteriorating situation in the Indo-Pacific and are concerned about it. And as John indicated, they're worried as well that it's going to draw US attention away.

That being said though, I'm not sure the speed and direction of travel is necessarily keeping up with things. So while NATO has done things like increase its cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners on things that are going to directly affect NATO territory, like cyber or hypersonic missiles, I don't know if it's yet been able to fully pick up on some of the implications of what would happen if a crisis was to break out in the Indo-Pacific.And I'll give you three examples just to sort of try and add a bit of granularity there.

So first the South China Sea: We're just a mistake or a misjudgment away from a crisis there now, if you look at the number of competing, greyhulled, grey-painted military assets that are now sort of in that region. And that's not just going to affect the bordering states of the South China Sea. That's going to bring in China, the United States, potentially even Russia, all of which can have security implications over the Euro-Atlantic zone and almost certainly can have an economic implication if trade takes a hit, which it almost certainly will.

If you look at the Korean Peninsula, it's been out of the news recently, but the situation is deteriorating there. I mean, it's been described as the worst situation since the end of the war in ‘53. And if it were to go badly wrong there—while, of course, the expectation would be the United States and the Republic of Korea, South Korea, who are at the front of any kind of response to North Korean aggression—if that were to turn into something major, you could see the situation where the dormant UN command gets reactivated, all those arms-sending states from 1953 receive requests to provide support, and a lot of them are also NATO countries.

And then of course there's the biggie, if you like, Taiwan, where the situation is definitely not heading in the right direction. You've got the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, increasing its size and capability massively. A hundred new advanced strike fighters just last year alone added to the available capabilities in the same across maritime forces and other things.

And that's coinciding with a period where other parts of President Xi's Chinese dream, the sort of economic societal development of China, are looking a bit faltering. If that were to turn into some kind of threat to the Communist Party's authority, to Xi's authority, you could well imagine situations where some kind of external aggression might be the way they go to get around that issue.

And that coincides again with increased strangling, an anaconda sort of squeeze of Taiwan, in an attempt to coerce the islanders into some kind of dialogue around unification. And it hasn't worked. The Democratic People's Party, which has ruled for the last two terms, was again reelected and are clear in their intentions.

Finally, you've got a situation where China has been well ahead on its military capability. It got a really good sort of learning start ahead of everybody else. You're now seeing the United States and its partners starting to catch up. And that could create a sort of military dynamic in the minds of China's leaders whereby “if we don't do it now, we're not going to be able to.” So I think that all adds up to some of these crises that maybe are not so far off as particularly NATO's European members might care to believe. And the consequences of them could be huge to the regional balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, certainly to drawing away US attention to that region and certainly economic.

I think it was Bloomberg that estimated that a Taiwan crisis would cost the global economy something like 10 trillion US dollars, that's 10% of the global GDP. It's probably likely to be a bigger hit than that. And you've also seen the autocracies of Eurasia, so Russia, North Korea, China, as well, of course, as Iran, increasingly operating in coordination, if not in exactly alliances or specific alliances for them.

Whereas Europe, in particular, is still seeing and tending to treat the Indo-Pacific as a place that is a long way away. They're not sort of coordinating that way. So there's a lot of drivers there that I think, yes, it's been noted by NATO, but not with maybe the urgency is needed.

RL: Right. And you point out three hotspot scenarios, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, and the biggie as you say, Taiwan. Certainly, the US is involved in each of those scenarios. But as far as the NATO organization, what is NATO currently doing in the region? There's so much focus, obviously, on the European theater and on supporting Ukraine since Russia's renewed invasion in 2022. But what is NATO doing in the Indo-Pacific region specifically?

PO: So I think the perception is it's doing more, but the reality is it's individual NATO nations who are doing more, not under a NATO flag. So you'll see increasing numbers of transits through the South China Sea, through the Taiwan Strait, countries like Germany doing transits like that, which is unprecedented again in many ways.

It hasn't been done for a while at least. You're seeing more cooperation on exercises and other things. You're seeing some of NATO's European members and the United States increasing their permanent presence in the region, looking to coordinate their carrier strike group deployments.

So there is more going on and then there's the sort of military capacity partnerships that have been developed by some of those nations. So things like AUKUS and the cooperation between Italy, the United Kingdom, and Japan on a sixth generation fighter. But none of those things have been done as NATO as a collective.

Although those things often get confused, not least because the likes of Russia and China want to represent that as NATO in the region, whereas it's not. It's NATO nations doing things individually, not NATO as a whole. If you were to look at what NATO is doing collectively, it's a bit more muted. So some of those capability partnerships that I mentioned earlier, but also inviting the leaders of their Indo-Pacific partners, the so-called IP4, to the NATO summit since 2022. But then when it came to even things like a proposed liaison office for NATO in Japan, that was vetoed.

And a lot of it's really been about how those partners in the Indo-Pacific can help out over the Ukraine situation, rather than about how NATO might help deter further aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

RL: So John, turning back to you, who are NATO's key partners in the region and what is the history and the purpose of these partnerships as they stand right now?

JH: Well, it's a great question, Rick. So you have what we call the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4): Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand. This arrangement is a formal arrangement by which those countries have sort of official relations with NATO. They're not observers, they're not members, but they do have certain equities. They also have standardization agreements by which they seek to drive equipment standards closer and more in alignment.

Some, like Japan, have been much more active than others. I think the Japanese seemed to be much further behind the other four in, say, the late 1990s, early 2000s, and so they began to really push hard: having a more significant staff dedicated to NATO affairs in their Brussels embassy, getting more of their students to the NATO Defense College. So just trying to build up the sinews, the people-to-people contacts.

And we've seen that in the Japanese defense think tank field: much more scholars and Japanese military academics focused on NATO and NATO affairs. As Pete said earlier, at the bilateral level, NATO and the Indo-Pacific are much more active. And I think it's in terms of the IP4, as they're called, the development of that has been gradual, very formulaic. I think there's been, in some areas—for example, defense industrial cooperation—areas of synergy. We've seen those countries pulled into non-NATO things, but better related to Europe.

I'll give you a classic example: the Prague Protocol, which was a 5G conference that the Czech Republic hosted in, I believe it was 2019, alongside the United States. And you could see by the member states, there were mostly NATO members and the IP4. So that's not an official IP4 thing, but the IP4 status has sort of afforded those four countries more involvement in some of those issues that are cross-sector, they're not theater specific.

And then, of course, there is the obvious one with the war in Afghanistan, where NATO and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had a very strong remit from the international community to deploy troops and build up provincial reconstruction teams and so on. Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand all played very, very strong roles in that. Japan, I believe, was the second largest contributor of funding to the war in Afghanistan after the United States.

South Korea had a provincial reconstruction team in Parwan near the embassy and so they all worked under ISAF pretty smoothly, working closely with the United States. So in a sense, all of them having alliance relations with the United States is a sort of ease of passage for the four. They all have that inclination to standardize in the same direction that the US equipment standards are set. But NATO also reinforces that.

So just within the perspective of the defense industry and defense production and innovation I think we've seen a lot of stuff happening that wouldn't necessarily be termed NATO official, but is helped by that IP4 construct.

RL: So it's probably not lost on our listeners that each of these four Indo-Pacific partners, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, are actually all treaty allies with the United States as well. Japan, South Korea through bilateral arrangements and then, Australia and New Zealand through the ANZUS treaty with the United States. So to what extent is this effort by NATO to strike these formal partnerships with these four countries: is this a US-driven effort or is NATO on board with this effort as well?

JH: I genuinely think that all four of the Indo-Pacific Four countries have their own relationships with NATO. I think they see it as an enabler for closer security ties to European member states and to Canada. There's probably some culpability on the US side that encourages it, but I think it's really been driven very much by the interest of those countries. They have greater access to Euro-Atlantic standards and regulations which help them sort of follow a general trend towards greater interoperability and interchangeability.

I think the United States is encouraging, but not the driver of it. I think, as I pointed out on the Japanese side, it's very much been driven by Tokyo and by a sense of growing insecurity in Japan from the early 2000s onward in the Junichiro Koizumi era, that China's growth was so significantly quick and so fast that even the United States' ability to single-handedly deter or win a conflict against China even with Japan was in doubt. And so there was, from the early 2000s onward, a surge of interest in NATO by Japanese thinkers and scholars.

PO: And ultimately nothing happens in NATO without the agreement of all of its member states. So you could see the argument that the United States would wish those partnerships to be there, but the history of them, they're all different in their own ways. And there's a different background to why each of the four came in as partners and those partnerships had to be agreed by all the other permanent members of NATO. They're called allied members so ultimately everybody has to say yes before it happens.

RL: Let's talk a little bit about if there's any tensions within the Alliance over committing more resources to the Indo-Pacific and doing more in the region.

JH: I think this conversation is very, very timely Rick and I thank you for doing it because I think while there's been broad acceptance in both the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific about the connectivity between the two regions, I think there's real hesitation in the Euro-Atlantic to commit resources and defense platforms and deterrence obligations to partners out in the Indo-Pacific. And I think some of the arguments are pretty strong. There is, after all, a US alliance network in the Indo-Pacific, the San Francisco system, which connects the US to Korea and Japan and the Philippines, Thailand. There is a soft arrangement with Singapore, not a full alliance, but certainly a very robust defense arrangement. And of course, ANZUS, as mentioned by Pete. So, why should NATO bolster those arrangements and thus weaken the amount of resources that can be deployed in support of the war against Russian aggression in Ukraine? I think all NATO members have, especially in Europe, a strong interest in seeing Russia thwarted in its attempt to take over Ukraine.

So I think that's the strategic tension when it comes down to the mechanisms by which NATO has to agree. Members, particularly those on the Eastern European side are more worried about Russia than they are about China, perhaps disagreeing with policy movements internally, and thwarting votes for structures that allow for a softer engagement with the Indo-Pacific region.

At the Washington Summit they made this a point of course: all the leaders from the IP4 were invited to Washington. NATO also launched a number of different things that were non-geographically limited, such as cyber defense, counter disinformation, and working on technology like AI. So you're starting to see NATO is an organization trying to deal with some of those tensions. But at heart, many of those tensions are political. And so I think that takes time.

It needs to be debated, discussed within the halls of NATO, within the capitals of the Eastern European countries, so that NATO security is not weakened by the deployment of significant assets and resources to a faraway theatre. But the arguments about the rules-based order and about the broader threats from authoritarian states against the rules-based order are very clearly made in the 2022 security concept. Those have some real resonance and they're not just rhetoric. So hopefully we'll see those tensions begin to be ironed out over coming years.

PO: I think we've talked before as well about how that sort of increasing interest from NATO members is perceived in the region. So the association of Southeast Asian nations, the ASEAN countries, the perception of what that greater presence means and how that lies with the traditional approach to balancing security and economic interests that goes on there.

JH: You're absolutely right. What's called the individually tailored partnership programs offers a great mechanism, as mentioned, that could be used for partnering with either regional organizations in some cases, or at least individual members. For example, you could do NATO Maritime Domain Awareness Training for the Philippines or other countries that are very willing or very much subject to duress and aggression at the moment, as we've seen, and as you mentioned earlier. Obviously, not in a way that is on the front line, but in building capacity and training programs and perhaps in terms of building up defence industrial capability and regulatory procedures.

People forget that NATO, much like the European Union, is a regulatory body in terms of the way that its doctrine, its equipment standardization, and its equipment innovation aligns all the different member states. And that could be turned to good use, I think, in the Indo-Pacific.

RL: NATO certainly has thousands and thousands of standards and doctrine standards that all allies are supposed to adhere to and partners try to achieve as well in the name of interoperability.

Now, some of the tensions inevitably are due to differing threat perceptions within NATO. John, you talked about how the Eastern European allies are obviously more focused on Russia, certainly historically, and then also the Southern European allies, perhaps more focused on the threats of terrorism and immigration coming from North Africa.

But I'd like to talk a little bit about other structural challenges impeding deeper NATO involvement in the region, and specifically the lack of Article V applicability. John, you've researched this with regard to Hawaii. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that story and why this Article V issue may be a challenge for deeper NATO involvement in the region?

JH: To some people's surprise not all parts of the United States, including some American states, are not covered by the NATO Treaty Article V. In the 1950s, when the NATO Treaty was being agreed upon, US negotiators allowed Article VI, which essentially basically defined what an armed attack was and restricted it by a number of different clauses, including Turkey, the Algerian Departments of France, non-European parts, they were in. But what was out was islands that were south of the Tropic of Cancer.

And of course, Hawaii and French New Caledonia are both south of the Tropic of Cancer. So why is this important and why did the Pacific Forum, both myself and Dr. David Santoro, write a number of things on this? First of all, Hawaii is not just a tropical, beautiful destination from where I'm talking to you now looking out at a gorgeous day. It's also home to the Pacific Fleet, to Indo-Pacific Command, the sort of overall combatant command for the area of the United States. Alongside Guam, it would be probably subject to attack in any Taiwan Strait intervention.

And so David and I wrote a piece, which essentially argued that while we didn't think that Hawaii should require a rewriting of the treaty, we thought there should be some sort of political discussion about it. Now, not just because we would want NATO states to send resources to a Taiwan war, which I'm sure many of our listeners would be horrified to think about, but for three other reasons. One is the deterrent effect it would have on China initiating a conflict in the first place. If it was going to cross the strait and invade, and it knew it was going to go to war with Japan and the United States right off the bat, and possibly the United Kingdom, how much more formidable of a deterrence would it be to know that it would also be going to war with many European states?

And what do I mean by that? I mean economics. European states trade heavily with China. If China knew that by crossing the strait, it would be losing trade with not only the number two, number three, but also the number one regional market, which is many states in the European Union, I think it would have a huge impact on Xi Jinping's thinking. And then secondly, there's the idea that China is a global actor now. It has many equities and naval units all over the Indian Ocean. Some visit and train closer to Russian waters on the European side. They're in the Arctic. With that sort of conflict, NATO may not even have to leave its region in order to be engaged in a sense that is meaningful for the United States and for its IP4 allies who would be more on the front line. So that was sort of our writing on that and I know Pete's also thought about it a lot. I think we've both been sort of toying with it.

PO: I remember John and I having this conversation about a year and a half ago, asking “What would it look like the day after if that were to happen?” I mean, that could be an existential problem for NATO from the outset of a crisis in the region and there are other things I think as well, beyond the sort of geography and the boundaries and how it was carefully set up in the first place, when the Alliance was formed for good reasons in the history of the time.

But I think there were some other structural issues which go back to those sort of founding principles. Because NATO fundamentally, as an organization, is set to look east to deter and defend against, first, the Soviet Union and now, of course, Russia. And it does that in a defensive way. So if attacked, if territory is invaded, it will respond. It's not necessarily well configured for proactivity and the sort of world we find ourselves in in terms of grey zones and other operation approaches that some of the opponents are taking. And you can see that in how its command and control is set up in terms of how it goes about planning.

So while NATO has done things clearly beyond that core central mission for which it was designed—whether that be the near-abroad response in the Balkans, Libya, or further field, counter-piracy operations, or as John was talking about earlier, the response in Afghanistan—those things have tended to be sort of bespoke, specific, designed, constructed operations for a particular situation that eventually came to an end. And afterwards NATO carried on doing its core business of looking east and deterring and defending in the eastern direction. So I think it's structurally quite hard for it to adapt to a world in which there is basically more than one superpower threat now. There was only one in the time that it was designed.

So while some of these conceptual things that NATO has been doing, like the multi-domain operations concept, have some of the tools it might need to think about responding to this new world we find ourselves in, it's just really difficult. The same with inertia in the system to sort of be able to make that big leap to say, “Hey, it's not just Russia.”

RL: So John, shifting gears here a little bit. To what extent is increased attention on the Indo-Pacific by some of these NATO allies on a bilateral basis or a minilateral basis a hedging strategy to persuade the Americans to stay engaged in NATO? I guess in other words, are the Europeans only paying attention to China because the Americans want them to?

JH: I'll start with the following statement. The 2022 security concept talks about the rules-based order. I lecture on the rules-based order at different institutions. And I often think we talk about it without knowing what it is and why we're fighting for it.

There's a lot of people who think it's just a mirage, et cetera, but I actually happen to believe that it’s like the driving rules and regulations in your country. If they weren't there, you'd really notice it. The idea that authoritarian states would rule by force is a very real one, and that territorial sovereignty would be at the mercy of what they want in terms of territorial aggrandizement. I think those two versions of the world are what we're wrestling over.

It's not US primacy. It's not US insistence on Taiwan being independent from China in order to contain China. We hear a lot of that messaging, which I think is sort of wispy and smoky. I think what it's fundamentally about is what type of order do you want to live in: one in which there is a broad set of rules that, yes, are not perfectly adhered to, but at least those rules are over everyone, including the largest power of the United States; or do you want a system in which there is one superpower, the Middle Kingdom, China?

Persuading European states to care about the Indo-Pacific is not just about talking about trade in the South China Sea, or what Japan and Korea would love for them to do, or what the United States would love for them to do. I think it's really important for us to try to understand those strategic possibilities at that top level. And I think what we're seeing in the European context, and Pete, again, you can correct me on this, are a lot more Europeans coming to the Indo-Pacific at the military side, the uniform side. And I'm hearing them speak and I'm feeling like, they get it, they get that there's a European story out here.

Europe, after all, had a war 70 years ago, which was exactly about authoritarian “might is right” and about territorial aggrandizement. So the Europeans know this story. And I hear them pulling that out in their discussions over here in the United States with US officials. And that's very heartening to see.

But I think when it comes to the public and when it comes to other parts of government, Treasury, Commerce, or the Chancellors of the Exchequer, those who are dedicated to trade and economic growth, which are always the primary thing that wins votes, I think that those discussions still need to be had. Those arguments still need to be made and they still need to be won. I don't think they have been. I don't think all of us really understand how connected the two regions are and how much Russia and China are going to treat them as connected as they tentatively but increasingly confidently move towards changing that balance of power in a way that reflects their authoritarian preferences.

I think the militaries of those countries of the European member states and NATO are starting to get it. They get it instinctively, especially from a maritime strategic perspective. But the arguments amongst the political elites and the economic policy elites, are still not landing quite as strongly as we'd like.

PO: I think I'd add as well, this is the moment we're in. In terms of the NATO members’ available resources, it's great that 21 of the 32 members are now meeting or exceeding the 2 percent. And a lot of that is going to defending and deterring Russia and helping Ukraine.

But there's a bandwidth issue for sure, because we've had a succession of crises. We've had Ukraine now running since 2022. Now we've got a major crisis in the Middle East. A lot of European countries are having their own domestic, political, and economic concerns. And all that is consuming bandwidth as well. So I think the logic-brain gets it, but then the reality of what's going on makes it difficult to sort of meet the priorities.

RL: Right, Pete, let's stick with you. So regarding NATO's role in the increasing US-China competition, has NATO carved a rollout for itself in this situation?

PO: I'd say now at the moment it's largely in the public diplomacy space so some of the things we already talked about: that really momentous decision to identify China as a strategic challenge in 2022. You'll see statements about concerns about regional developments in the Indo-Pacific and much more pointed statements in the last communique after the last summit about the role that China and North Korea are playing in supporting Russia and some of those capability developments as well, which are longer-term, certainly longer than the 2027 deadline that has been given to the PLA to be ready for an attack in Taiwan, for example.

But when it comes more to what could NATO do to help deterrence and defense within the Indo-Pacific, even if only from afar, I think there's more that could be done, but that's going to need some kind of change in the zeitgeist, I think, to get over that current disconnect that seems to be going on where it's still considered as a distant problem.

RL: John, anything to add to that as far as what NATO can do more to help deter China's aggression in the region?

JH: I completely agree with Pete there that Russia has to remain the focus of NATO purely because that's where a majority of its core members are. I agree also that at the moment in the public diplomacy space, you can see inklings of deterrence coming out in the language, particularly of the Secretary General during the Washington Summit in July.

I think the idea that we would rewrite Article VI to include Hawaii is probably not going to happen. Even the French who do not have any sort of coverage of the new French New Caledonia are not particularly keen on rewriting. But I think some discussions internally should be had.

RL: Let's not forget about the Falkland Islands as well, right? Because they would theoretically apply as well.

JH: I would argue that there's a fundamental difference because a Taiwan conflict would fundamentally rewrite the order in the Indo-Pacific, it would destabilize economic markets, and it would halt a major source of technology, the semiconductor, which would have spillover effects on almost every sector. So yes, of course, the Falklands was a test bed of Article VI, but I think we're in a different space here. If the UK had lost the Falklands, would that have fundamentally altered the rules-based order in the South Atlantic? Probably not.

But would Taiwan impact not only the order in the Indo-Pacific? Because remember, owning Taiwan would straddle the energy and supply lines for South Korea and Japan to Europe. It would be the final chokehold secured from what is already established in the South China Sea. I will concede this. I think on both the US side and on some official side, I've heard the following sort of thing, but of course NATO would do that. And I think that's very reassuring on a personal level to hear that. What worries me is that I don't know if the European public is aware of this discussion. I know the American public, and before this last year, before the sort of media stories about it and over July, I don't think they were aware that Hawaii was out.

As Pete said earlier, it would be a huge crisis for NATO if some members decided, no, we're not going to war. We're going to keep trading with China, act like business as usual on day two of an attack on Guam and Hawaii. And it would fundamentally shape US public perceptions of NATO, which would be a huge blow to the Alliance if the US public begins to turn against the Alliance.

And so it's not just deterrence. It's not just messaging. It's also safeguarding the Alliance to make sure that one of its largest members is able to do its self-assigned task, which is deterring large authoritarian power from gobbling up a neighbor.

It needs to be discussed, it needs to be signaled. Does the treaty need to be rewritten? I think that's unlikely and probably impossible. But certainly there needs to be a political discussion in Brussels and it needs to be one that I think is consistently held and openly held so that and those naysayers and doubters and also those authoritarian powers listening to it will start to realize that gradually, that even if NATO does not openly say it will defend Hawaii, it'll be assumed.

PO: So I guess I'd add, it was interesting when John and David's paper came out and then it was sort of seen on this side of the Atlantic and then immediately there were all these quick naysayers around all the other territories.

I mean, you've mentioned a few there, but there's plenty of other territories in different parts of the world that, would they be in the scope? I think if there is going to be a conversation around Article VI, it just needs to be really tightly focused around threat.

I mean, we already know that China has built mock-ups of various bits of Guam, the Andersen Air Force base of the naval installation, which it regularly packs firing missiles at. We know that they're thinking that Hawaii would be a potential target. So if there is going to be a conversation around that Article VI piece, let's just focus on the things that really matter in it, rather than allowing the conversation to get lost in broader rewriting of the histories of how the whole thing was set in the first place. I think there's some other steps though that could be done, if there was will, relatively rapidly that would also help to that overall deterrence and defense that NATO might provide into the region.

So the first area would be increasing coordination between NATO and the IP4. Some of these things are happening, but to accelerate them in an operational way around intelligence sharing, putting in place more robust liaison structures, command and control arrangements that allow situational understanding between the two theatres to be more seamlessly understood. Some of that interoperability we talked about earlier, which really is the secret source of how NATO achieves conventional deterrence. All the different procedures have built it up over the decades to share that more rapidly and more widely with the IP4 and then even into the exercise space.

It'd be really neat if you could try and synchronize the exercise schedule in the NATO area with the big major exercises in the Indo-Pacific region. So in terms of timing, they're achieving a more coherent strategic effect, and in terms of their scenarios, they're starting to think about situations where several of these things are going off at the same time, because it doesn't seem likely that if you have a crisis in the Indo-Pacific, it's going to be not coincident with maybe Ukraine still running on, or there's something happening elsewhere in the NATO area. So trying to think about those situations where Eurasia's autocracies are increasingly operating together in tandem and in certain ways. Whether that’d be sort of as we've seen recently, Russia and China patrolling up near US Arctic regions in the last few months, off Alaska.

So there's more that could be done on the sort of bringing-together operational coordination. And then I think linked with that would be having some contingency plans for situations that might arise where you've got multi-threat scenarios: allowing to move with some of the responsive reactive postures, being a bit more proactive, and having partners in the two theatres help each other out. Whether that be logistic support or working out what they'll do about force flow from one region to another, but also then thinking about some sort of offset options.

Russia and China in particular, they're global actors, they've got global interests. If one of them has been provocative in one region, how could partners in create dilemmas for them in a different region, which could help and bring them back from, or give them at least another set of problems to think about, rather than focusing on one threat area? So for example, Russia has got a Pacific Front, right? It's got a Pacific Fleet. That's something that is open to being threatened if Russia is threatening in the Euro-Atlantic.

Equally, China is a huge global actor and a huge and growing military with an enormous industrial base behind it to sustain it, but is massively reliant on imports and huge quantities of oil that it imports on a daily basis, much of that by sea. China consumes 75 percent of all seaborne oil that's imported around the world, and 95 percent of its trade travels by sea. These are vulnerabilities that cut across the globe, and a lot of them cut across NATO's area.

NATO could be thinking about contingency plans and even if nobody was expected to deploy en masse to the Indo-Pacific. If there was a crisis there, it could certainly make problems for China, and it could do that in ways that don't even necessarily involve taking its eye off the Russia problem because interdicting trade is a problem for patrol boats, not for frigates and destroyers. And NATO's got something like 300 of them.

JH: If I could add something to Pete, you're brilliant, and you've triggered something in me which is the integrated effect that NATO has, that it brings to its defense industry, and its equipment. Here in the Indo-Pacific, US allies are obviously integrated with the United States, but they're less integrated with each other.

We've seen real shortages of equipment and material during the Ukraine war for Europeans, and there’s lessons learned in the battlefields of Ukraine for Indo-Pacific partners and allies. So having NATO thinkers, officials coming out here, teaching those lessons, teaching the lessons of defense industry integration, how do you cooperate across that space, which is very difficult, very sensitive. I think that would also be of immense help deterrence in the region as well.

RL: We're going to have to leave it there. Peter Olive, John Hemmings, thanks so much for being on Ties of That Bind.

JH: Thanks so much.

PO: Thanks for having us.