![Russian military sailors attend a welcome ceremony of their joint naval forces exercise in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, China](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/07/19/TELEMMGLPICT000385670960_17214063916590_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtR1WRZ4lb6BOb1-FBRpn-lFGGjcI28awSNtOPAVs6pc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Russian military sailors attend a welcome ceremony of their joint naval forces exercise in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, China](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/07/19/TELEMMGLPICT000385670960_17214063916590_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtR1WRZ4lb6BOb1-FBRpn-lFGGjcI28awSNtOPAVs6pc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
For understandable reasons, all eyes have been on Western actions in recent weeks, with the Nato and Blenheim summits marking sizable opportunities for Ukraine’s allies to bolster their support for Kyiv.
Whether they succeeded in that task will be for history to judge. Yet one aspect of our foreign policy that history, surely, will not judge kindly is in our naïve approach to China, a country that – while the world has been distracted – has been increasingly engaging in activities designed to undermine the United States and its allies.
In a marked and worrying development, as 32 transatlantic allies gathered in Washington, DC (along with the three Indo-Pacific leaders from New Zealand, Japan and South Korea) China started military drills with Belarus – a close ally to, and de facto province of, Russia – directly on the Nato border.
Belarus has been involved in Russia’s hybrid war against the West since 2021. It was three years ago when the world first learned about “weaponisation of migration”, when thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa and Middle East were transported to Belarus and over the Polish border. Since February 2022, Belarus has successfully facilitated Russian troops movement into Ukraine and provided logistical support for the invasion from the north. It has also participated in Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling by allegedly hosting some of its nuclear arsenal closer to Nato’s border.
What could China’s joint drills with such an actor be other than serving as a clear signal that it’s now a party to the war in Europe and has chosen whose side it is on?
Concurrently with the drills in Belarus, Chinese Navy conducted maritime exercises in Taiwan Strait, having violated the island’s airspace a record number of times. And earlier this week, Russia joined China in live-fire naval exercises in the South China Sea.
We tend to forget just how closely intertwined the Chinese and Russian state – symbolically and politically. The two powers have conducted numerous military exercises with Russia. Most of the land drills in recent years, the so-called “Peace Missions”, occurred in either Russia, China or other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation states, aimed at suppressing social uprisings or major insurgencies. Joint Sino-Russian exercises were also conducted in maritime and aerospace, limited predominantly to the Far East, with one exclusion of naval drills in the Baltic Sea in 2017.
All this matters because China has kept a perceived “impartiality” over the war in Ukraine, calling both parties for peace. But while it hasn’t been directly sending mass numbers of weapons to Russia (like, for example, Iran or North Korea), China has nonetheless been supplying Russia with critical resources for its war effort in the form of dual use tech, while bankrolling Russia’s war economy through purchases of oil and gas sanctioned by the West.
Japan, a guest at this year’s Nato Summit, while in talks of opening a Nato liaison office in Tokyo, issued a warning about China’s escalatory moves in the region. According to Japan’s recently published Defence White Paper, China plans to double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. It also mentions North Korea as a growing risk factor, with attempts to boost its nuclear strike capability and missile range to have the capacity to reach as far as the US. In June, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defence pledge deal that binds the two countries in any military altercations.
This unholy axis is creating extraordinary security threats that will change the world as we know it. European allies on the Eastern flank of Nato, according to sources in their governments, are considering obtaining a shared nuclear arsenal as a deterrent in an increasingly uncertain world, especially with the US becoming more isolationist. This could lead to an unprecedented shift towards wider proliferation as a similar process takes place in the Middle East.
As Nato celebrated being the most successful military-political alliance in the world’s history earlier this month, the interconnectedness of global threats and indivisibility of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-pacific security went through every statesman’s and woman’s speech as a thin thread. Nato’s umbrella can no longer be limited to the North-Atlantic and inviting the four powers of Indo-Pacific – Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia – shows that understanding.
In its final statement, Nato reprimanded China for its expansive behavior and for aiding Russia. But statements need to be followed by actions. Re-establishing peace can only be achieved through the exertion of strength by 32 allies united by a shared vision. This should define the next 75 years of Nato.
Aliona Hlivco is Managing Director of the Henry Jackson Society, a trans-Atlantic foreign policy and national security think tank.
She is a regular contributor to The Telegraph’s daily podcast ‘Ukraine: The Latest’, including our most recent episode. With over 85 million downloads, it is considered the most trusted daily source of war news on both sides of the Atlantic.
War with China is closer than we think
While the West is distracted, Xi is conducting exercises with Russia and Belarus - including right on Nato’s door step