- The Indo-Pacific is now a core strategic concern for NATO: Maritime instability, technological rivalry, and China’s assertiveness directly impact Euro-Atlantic security. NATO must expand its role in the region without becoming a regional alliance.
- India offers a balancing force — on its own terms: While committed to strategic autonomy and cautious toward alliances, India sees value in a calibrated NATO presence as a counterbalance to China’s regional influence.
- Practical cooperation matters more than formal alignment: Joint exercises (e.g. with Nave Cavour), interoperable systems, and shared standards in domains like AI, cyber, and undersea warfare are essential to future deterrence and stability.
The NATO Summit in The Hague inevitably focused on ongoing crises: the war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East, and heightened tensions following military clashes between Israel and Iran. Yet, if the Alliance intends to maintain a strategic global role in the decades ahead, it must have the discipline to look beyond the immediate and structure a coherent engagement in the Indo-Pacific region.
Over the past five years, NATO has strengthened its dialogue with Indo-Pacific partners: Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand are already structurally integrated into summits under the “IP4” format. NATO has engaged more cautiously with India. However, the systemic context now demands a qualitative leap. China’s maritime expansion, grey zone operations, investments in dual-use technologies—from artificial intelligence to biotechnology—and growing military assertiveness make Indo-Pacific stability a central concern for Euro-Atlantic security.
NATO cannot transform into an Indo-Pacific alliance, but it also cannot remain peripheral to a region where key economic, maritime, and technological balances are being decided. Trade flows through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea have direct repercussions on Allied economies. A regional conflict—even a limited one—would have systemic effects. Some initiatives are already underway: exercises like Sea Dragon (involving the U.S., Australia, India, Canada, and South Korea), increased joint activities with Japan, and expanded maritime domain awareness. But these efforts are not enough.
In this context, the relationship with India becomes particularly important. Delhi maintains a position of “strategic autonomy,” rejecting rigid alliances and pursuing an independent projection—also to avoid friction with Moscow, its traditional military partner, from which it is slowly trying to disengage. Yet this posture makes a flexible, multi-tiered cooperation both useful and feasible. India has a vested interest in maintaining balance in its region and is increasingly concerned about Chinese pressure along its land and maritime borders. A well-calibrated NATO engagement in the Indo-Pacific could offer Delhi a valuable strategic counterweight.
This cooperation will not take the form of a formal alliance but of concrete, multi-level partnerships. Joint exercises, such as those carried out last year with the Italian Carrier Strike Group led by Nave Cavour, are effective examples of functional interoperability. The future of deterrence also depends on the ability to operate together, share standards, and integrate technologies and surveillance systems—especially in emerging domains such as AI and undersea warfare. In this sense, the NATO-India dialogue can extend into cybersecurity and sensitive technology governance.
The goal is not to absorb India into a Western security architecture, but to build cooperation based on shared interests, operational complementarities, and pragmatism. India, in the western segment of the Indo-Pacific, can serve as a cornerstone for a more coherent NATO presence in the region—without contradicting its principles of non-alignment.
In the 21st century, threats are defined less by geography and more by connectivity. That is why maintaining the international order requires an extension of Euro-Atlantic linkages toward the East. Overlooking the Indo-Pacific today means compromising collective security tomorrow.
