- China and Russia are making the waters around Japan the focal point of their naval cooperation, conducting 27 joint activities in the Sea of Japan and the Pacific since 2021, according to Geopolitical Futures.
- The trend points to growing operational coordination rather than isolated exercises, strengthening Beijing and Moscow’s ability to apply sustained pressure on the U.S.-led alliance network in the Indo-Pacific.
- Japan is responding by expanding its own maritime partnerships, increasing joint naval diplomacy and exercises across Asia and beyond to reinforce regional deterrence and coalition interoperability.
Data compiled by Geopolitical Futures suggests that the waters around Japan have become the primary theater of China-Russia naval cooperation. Since 2021, the two navies have carried out 14 joint activities in the Sea of Japan and another 13 in the Pacific, indicating that operational coordination is increasingly concentrated around the core of the U.S. alliance network in Northeast Asia.
The numbers matter less than the trend they reveal. Regular joint patrols and exercises allow Chinese and Russian forces to improve interoperability, communications and command coordination over time. Together with recurring joint air patrols, these operations point to a gradual normalization of coordinated military activity in the Western Pacific rather than isolated demonstrations of force.
This does not necessarily signal the emergence of a formal military alliance. Instead, it reflects a growing ability by Beijing and Moscow to apply coordinated strategic pressure on the U.S.-led regional security architecture. For Japan, this means treating China, Russia and North Korea less as separate security challenges and more as interconnected elements of a single strategic environment.
Tokyo’s response, reflected in the same Geopolitical Futures dataset, has been to deepen its own network of partnerships. Between 2023 and 2026, Japan conducted 98 naval diplomacy and goodwill activities, with Asia accounting for nearly half of them, while also expanding engagement with Oceania and North America. The strategy is clear: offset the growing operational coordination between China and Russia by strengthening an increasingly integrated coalition of like-minded maritime partners.
The Indo-Pacific is moving beyond episodic deterrence toward persistent strategic competition. China and Russia are making coordinated military operations a routine feature of the regional security landscape, while Japan is responding by transforming its alliance network into a more active and operational maritime coalition. The result is an Indo-Pacific defined less by isolated crises than by continuous strategic positioning.
