By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The U.S. Atlantic and Pacific Strategies

On October 28, 2024, a group of South Korean intelligence officials briefed NATO members and the alliance’s three other Indo-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, and New Zealand—on a shocking development in the war in Ukraine: North Korea’s deployment of thousands of its troops to Russia’s Kursk region to aid Moscow’s war effort. The fact that Seoul sent its top intelligence analysts to Brussels for the briefing was nearly as stunning as North Korea’s decision to enter the war in Ukraine.

Both developments reflected a new reality. The United States’ adversaries are coordinating with one another in unprecedented ways, creating a more unified theater of competition in Eurasia. In response, U.S. allies are coalescing. For a few years, the United States led that effort. In 2021, it formed AUKUS, a security arrangement with Australia and the United Kingdom. In 2022, NATO began inviting Asian countries to participate in its annual summits. And in 2024, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and the EU created a coalition to loosen China’s grip over pharmaceutical supply chains.

Today, however, the United States appears to be dispensing with a transregional approach to great-power competition. In May, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, dissuaded British officials from sending an aircraft carrier on a scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific. The gist of Colby’s position, according to an anonymous source quoted by Politico, was simple: “We don’t want you there.” He urged them to focus instead on threats closer to home—namely, Russia.

Washington is now encouraging its Asian and European allies to stick to their neighborhoods—a throwback foreign policy that is ill-suited to the current moment. China and Russia are synchronizing their transgressions and sharing weapons and know-how. Together, they pose a threat more formidable than any the United States has faced in decades. The lines between Asia and Europe are blurring, and crises on one continent have spillover effects in the other. The United States should try to influence the new networks its allies are crafting, not resist them. Otherwise, Washington may find itself on the fringes of a new global order.

An Abrams tank near Orzysz, Poland, September 2025

 

Come Together

American primacy depends on Asian and European security. In the 1940s, the political scientist Nicholas Spykman argued the importance of commanding the coastal edges, or rimlands, of Eurasia. “Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia,” he wrote. “Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Since then, every U.S. president—except Donald Trump—has shared Spykman’s conviction. They have also shared a belief that the United States should never again allow the emergence of a powerful Eurasian bloc that could threaten American interests. Any alignment of regional powers, whether as allies or in coordinated opposition to the United States, could pose a threat to U.S. preeminence. When that happened in the 1910s and again in the 1930s, the United States was drawn into two devastating world wars. Thus, while American leaders firmly committed themselves to both Asian and European security after World War II, they also spent most of the next 50 years trying to keep U.S. adversaries divided and U.S. allies apart.

This approach sustained American dominance for decades. But it is no longer fit for purpose. The United States now faces the prospect of an emerging Eurasian military-industrial bloc. China, the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity, is building a partnership with Russia that is an alliance in all but name. Both countries have formidable militaries and years of experience carrying out hybrid operations, such as cyberattacks, maritime disruptions, and disinformation campaigns. Last year, Russia signed a mutual defense treaty with North Korea. China has conducted joint military exercises with Belarus and Serbia. Meanwhile, China and Russia use institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS, a group named after its first five members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—to provide a veneer of legitimacy to their plans.

Although this loose coalescing of adversaries is driven more by shared grievances than by common interests, the United States cannot ignore it. Washington must unify its alliances by investing in cross-regional ties. U.S. President Joe Biden recognized that need and sought to build “the muscle of democratic alliances.” The AUKUS pact, for example, was an ambitious effort to forge connections among allied defense industries across the Atlantic and the Pacific in fundamentally new ways.

With Chinese technologies and North Korean troops aiding Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, European partners know they can’t sit on the sidelines of Asian geopolitics. And Indo-Pacific partners understand that what happens in Ukraine today could influence how China approaches Taiwan tomorrow. As Japan’s former foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi has put it, security in Europe and security in the Pacific “are not separable.” Over the past seven years, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the EU all drafted new Indo-Pacific strategies that stress the importance of working with Asian democracies to build resilient supply chains and protect freedom of navigation. In 2021, Germany and the Netherlands deployed frigates to the Indo-Pacific for the first time in decades. And according to the Kiel Institute, a German think tank, Japan has sent more bilateral economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine than have Finland, France, or Poland.

Since January, the United States has resisted the growing ties between its Asian and European partners. In September, Trump said that he was “not concerned at all” about a Chinese-Russian axis forming against the United States. At the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s largest annual defense conference, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for the United States’ European allies to “maximize their comparative advantage” on their own continent and reminded them that “the N in NATO stands for ‘North Atlantic.’” Readouts of meetings between Pentagon officials and European allies no longer mention Indo-Pacific security, as they frequently did over the past few years. And meetings between the United States and Asian countries have stopped referring to the importance of peace in Ukraine. In June, for the first time in three years, Indo-Pacific leaders were absent from NATO’s summit, despite their countries’ significant contributions to European defense.

The Trump administration seems to want its allies, especially those in Europe, to stick to their own backyard so that they can shoulder a larger responsibility for their own security. The United States is focused on maintaining order in the Western Hemisphere, defending the homeland, and limiting U.S. commitments abroad. U.S. adversaries, however, are sharing their technological and military resources in ways that could wear down individual U.S. allies and prolong regional conflicts. Moreover, China and Russia are deploying cyber, space, and other tools around the globe, reducing the chance that any one crisis will be contained within a single geographic region.

Walling off Asian and European allies from one another would leave the United States and its friends weaker. The risk of a multitheater crisis is growing. Washington and its allies need to prepare to deter multiple adversaries in different regions. Their ability, or lack thereof, to muster a unified front will shape the calculus of leaders in Beijing and Moscow. The United States’ friends and foes are realigning. Washington can sit on the sidelines or try to mold the emerging order to its favor.

An unidentified missile, Kharkiv, Ukraine

 

Double Trouble

China and Russia are collaborating in ways that the United States is not prepared for. The two countries are leveraging their relationship and also their respective partnerships with North Korea and Iran to cause trouble. In Asia and Europe, Beijing and Moscow are using “gray zone” operations to bully U.S. allies, weaken their militaries, and call into question the unity and capability of democratic groups such as the EU, the G-7, and NATO. For instance, China and Russia have tried to intimidate Japan and South Korea by conducting joint air patrols off their coasts. European officials have investigated Chinese- and Russian-linked ships for sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. And according to the European Policy Center, Chinese and Russian online disinformation campaigns now “increasingly converge in both tactics and objectives.” For example, Chinese and Russian state media have amplified each other’s narratives, including by blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine and spreading conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.

China and Russia are also integrating their capabilities in ways that will shape future wars. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s years-long bombardment of Ukraine would not have been possible without access to Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean weapons, technologies, and personnel. And U.S. officials have said that Moscow is repaying Beijing and Pyongyang by sending them stealth, submarine, missile, and satellite technologies it had previously been unwilling to share. The U.S. intelligence community’s most recent threat assessment warns that this greater alignment of adversaries “increases the chances of U.S. tensions or conflict with any one of these adversaries drawing in another.” In 2024, a bipartisan congressional commission of former senior civilian and military officials similarly concluded that the United States “should assume that if it enters a direct conflict involving Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, that country will benefit from economic and military aid from the others.”

China and Russia are making themselves more capable of sustaining regional conflicts for a longer time. The United States and its allies will not be prepared to manage this challenge unless they also collaborate militarily. Fortunately, Washington’s friends are already doing so. Just as Russia has relied on Chinese and North Korean assistance to keep up its assault on Ukraine, NATO has been able to sustain Ukrainian defenses because Australia, Japan, and South Korea have been quietly backfilling U.S. stocks of 155-millimeter artillery rounds and Patriot missiles. Similarly, European deployments to the Indo-Pacific theater, although limited, have helped maintain allied presence around the South China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait, especially as U.S. ships have been redeployed to the Middle East and elsewhere.

 

 

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