Ely Ratner, a rabidly anti-China war-hawk, proposes in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, in an article “The Case for a Pacific Defense Pact,” that now is the time to create an Asian “NATO.” Ratner argues that while there are different defense agreements among and between countries in Asia, there is not one overall alliance, in which mutual self-defense is considered. This approach coheres with the outlook of the U.S. shifting to gearing up against China as the primary “enemy.”
Ratner states, “Today, in the face of a growing threat from China, it [a collective defense pact] is both viable and essential. American allies in the region are already investing in their own defenses and forging deeper military bonds. But without a robust commitment to collective defense, the Indo-Pacific is on a path to instability and conflict.”
Ratner enumerates the limitation of today’s defense alliances, in that in Asia there does not exist what would be considered a NATO “Article 5” of mutual self-defense: “U.S. allies will also need to commit to greater degrees of mutual obligation with the United States. Washington’s security treaty with Tokyo, for instance, is bound only to ‘the territories under the administration of Japan.’ The resulting imbalance is on display at every major bilateral summit, where U.S. leaders reaffirm their commitment to defend Japan and Japanese leaders stay silent on whether their forces would assist the U.S. military elsewhere.”
But Ratner sees times changing. “The conditions once preventing multilateral alignment in Asia are giving way to fresh calls for collective defense. Just before taking office last year, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba warned that ‘the absence of a collective self-defense system like NATO in Asia means that wars are likely to break out.’ In fact, such a collective defense pact is now within reach.” Ratner proposes four countries to start the Asian NATO: Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and the United States. Other countries could be brought in.
From 2021-2025, Ratner was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, overseeing the Biden administration’s confrontational Asia policy. From 2015 through 2017, he served as the Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. Ratner is the principal at the Marathon Institute, one of the leading think tanks for military confrontation against China.
