NATO’s primary concept for military threats, Deterrence and Defense of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA), was approved by Allied Defense Ministers in 2020, providing a “single, coherent framework for NATO to contest, deter and defend against the Alliance’s main threats”, namely Russia and terrorism (NATO 2025). After decades of crisis response and management operations succeeding the Cold War, this marked a significant recalibration towards focusing on Russia, placing the strategic military concept at the heart of the Alliance’s response to its Eurasian neighbor’s invasion of Ukraine (Covington 2023). 

However, due to DDA’s focus on two imminent threats - Russia and terrorism - the concept falls short in addressing long-term systemic challenges posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ever-intensifying “strategic partnership” with the Russian Federation (Deni 2021; Graham 2023). This is even though NATO has, on multiple occasions, warned that the PRC’s stated ambitions and concomitant coercive policies run contrary to Allied values, interests, and security, including in its 2022 Strategic Concept, 2024 Report of the Secretary General, and the 2025 Maritime Strategy (NATO 2022; 2025; 2025). Consequently, DDA leaves Allies with a vacuum on how to reconcile the military support of China as well as other actors such as North Korea and Iran to Russia, which renders Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security indivisible (Sacks 2024).

Resulting key recommendations include:

• Expand DDA’s focus to states directly supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine militarily, chiefly China, North Korea, and Iran.

• Reduce foreign intelligence gathering risks by encouraging Allies to exercise increased caution in granting security clearances to NATO citizens with connections to countries militarily supporting Russia, including: dual nationality, personal ties, extensive non-touristic visits, investments, and ideological affinity.

• Increase the focus on non-NATO partner countries in the Indo-Pacific, including forming a novel partnerships framework for the region with current and new partners geopolitically threatened by the PRC such as the Philippines and India.
  
  

Critique of Current Policy
NATO SHAPE’s Strategic and International Affairs Advisor Steven Covington is widely regarded as the DDA concept’s main author (Covington 2023). Arguably, the military concept is highly sensible with regards to deterring Russia, as it correctly anticipated Russia’s propensity to use full-scale military force against its neighbors visible since 2022 in Ukraine, accounting for both deterrence in a multi-domain environment preventing Russian aggression and for the alliance’s military preparedness in case such deterrence fails (NATO 2025). However, due to higher direct military exposure to the Alliance’s Eurasian neighbor, DDA almost exclusively deals with the threat posed to the Arctic and Euro-Atlantic areas by the Russian Federation. From this, one can derive three main critiques of the concept:

1. DDA neglects NATO’s main strategic competitor - China  - and other countries such as North Korea and Iran that have consistently supported Russia’s war against Ukraine militarily and shown their willingness to use force against some of the Alliance’s non-NATO partners.

This is despite the fact that China’s economy is 9 times larger than Russia’s, its army almost twice the size of that of its bicontinental neighbor, and that it has consistently supported Russia diplomatically at the UN Security Council, with exports of dual-use goods, and joint military exercises visible since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Hart et al. 2025). On top of that, the PRC has voiced similar aspirations with regards to military action against what it considers to be its province of Taiwan, demonstrating that increased cooperation with Russia may lead to a war in the Indo-Pacific, supported by Putin, with far greater potential economic implications for NATO (Sacks 2024).

In addition, North Korea’s signing of a mutual defense treaty with Russia succeeded by the dispatch of 15,000 troops and thousands of workers to the war, the delivery of weapons and ammunitions, the export of dual-use goods, and joint military exercises showcase that countries in the Indo-Pacific are the main external enabler of NATO’s biggest security threat: Russian aggression in Ukraine (Hart et al. 2025; Sacks 2024). 

Moreover, as President Zelensky of Ukraine asserted after the Islamic Republic’s April 2024 attack on Israel using its home-built drones also supplied to Russia: “the sound of "Shahed" drones, a tool of terror, is the same in the skies over the Middle East and Europe. This sound must serve as a wake-up call to the free world [...]” (Zelensky 2024). Iran, along with the two additional military ‘supply lines’ to Moscow enabling the destruction of Ukraine and threatening the Alliance’s security, are disregarded in the DDA concept.

2. As a direct consequence, DDA only implicitly addresses intelligence threats relating to actors beyond Russia, such as the PRC and Iran. 

This is especially concerning in light of China's ‘overseas police stations’ aimed at squashing its dissenting diaspora abroad. Such security bureaus were found in 53 different countries, including 15 NATO countries (Indo-Pacific Defense Forum 2023). The US started prosecuting Chinese officials involved in attempting to convince diaspora dissidents to return home, Germany’s 2023 Strategy on China called them a violation of sovereignty and vehicles of transnational repression, whilst the G7 pointed to their violation of the Vienna Conventions on Consular Relations due to the PRC claiming that these stations were mere ‘service centers’ (Dirks, Emile, and Fu 2024).

However, a crucial question remains: if China goes through such lengths to persecute ‘enemies’ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), what would keep it from launching covert operations to sow incohesion, commit corporate espionage, and gather intelligence indispensable in case of military confrontation with the Alliance supporting many of its geopolitical adversaries in the Indo-Pacific? The answer is, not much. After all, NATO countries would arguably be the most steadfast in support of the Taiwanese government, should the PRC decide to reclaim the territory by force. Considering that Russian intelligence services are estimated to employ around 200,000 people (House of Commons 2018), China’s 600,000 employees in the field are likely already infiltrating NATO institutions and national governments (Corera 2024).

3. Finally, although DDA recognizes the importance of non-NATO partners, the concept primarily focuses on the Euro-Atlantic Area, diminishing its potential in the Indo-Pacific region.

NATO maintains partnerships with 35 non-member states through four different frameworks: Partnerships for Peace (PfP), focused on Eurasia; the Mediterranean Dialogue (MD), entailing partners from North Africa, Israel, and Jordan; the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), including four countries from the Gulf; and Partners Across the Globe. Currently, the only partners from the Indo-Pacific region falling under this section are Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand (and, depending on one’s interpretation, Pakistan and Mongolia).

Considering China’s repeated threats of using military force against Taiwan and its overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, the DDA concept may lack the urgency to exploit the Indo-Pacific’s geopolitical opportunities for countering the PRC’s coercive strategies. Additionally, North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, support for Russia, and continued missile threats against South Korea and Japan further underline avenues for political and military cooperation to mitigate shared threats.

Apart from this, three key Allies hold direct stakes beyond military presence in the region. First, the US territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the State of Hawaii are located at the heart of the Indo-Pacific. Second, France’s New Caledonia and French Polynesia are equally sovereign territory of an Ally in the region. Finally, the UK’s British Indian Ocean Territory is home to a joint US-UK naval facility. Though not covered by Article 5, this warrants increased ‘neighborly engagement’ supported by other NATO Allies with countries in the region facing similar challenges.

Policy Recommendations

1.  Expanding DDA’s focus to states directly supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine militarily, chiefly China, North Korea, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, by integrating them into strategic planning and resilience measures.

This requires  enhancing intelligence-sharing on external enablers, widening export-control and supply-chain defenses, and preparing coordinated responses to future transfers of arms, dual-use components, or financial backing. By treating these actors not as peripheral but as primary amplifiers of Russian military capacity, NATO strengthens forward deterrence, closes current policy gaps, and better protects the Euro-Atlantic Area from externally enabled aggressions. 

2. Reduce foreign intelligence gathering risks by encouraging Allies to exercise increased caution in granting security clearances to NATO citizens with connections to countries militarily supporting Russia.

This should include voluntary guidelines for members to increase screening for security clearances of individuals holding dual nationality of a NATO country and Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, as well as those with a high prevalence of terror groups active on NATO soil. Other determinants ought to include personal ties, extensive non-touristic visits, investments, and ideological affinity with such hostile governments. Wherever cases where Allies fail to apply such due diligence emerge, NATO’s Allied Command Counterintelligence (ACCI) could exercise increased screening of new arrivals on allied bases.

3. Establish a separate Indo-Pacific Partnerships Framework (IPPF) aimed at garnering political and military cooperation between NATO and countries challenged by China’s coercive policies.

This partnership program could, similar to PfP, ICI, and the MD, provide a venue for long-term capacity building and increased interoperability for nations facing similar geopolitical challenges, including current partners Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Two additional countries share such structural challenges and are democracies, providing opportunities for new partnerships:

Firstly, the Philippines, a country which has seen the PRC build artificial islands, patrol, and exploit the fishing resources of its territorial waters in violation of the 2016 UNCLOS Arbitration Court decision, which dismissed the legal basis of PRC’s claimed nine-dash line in the South China Sea (Pemmaraju 2016; Poling et al. 2016). A steadfast ally of the United States since WWII with a mutual defense treaty signed in 1951, expanding this military partnership to NATO would strengthen the Philippines’ position vis-à-vis China and make it a fellow non-NATO partner along its preferred regional allies of Japan and Australia (Amador 2021, 3).

Secondly, India, which has territorial disputes over Aksai Chin with China and cordial relations with Russia, provides an opportunity to both court China and offer India a viable alternative to Russian weaponry and training. India’s perception of France as one of its sole constant Western arms suppliers during the Cold War could ameliorate this undertaking, and the fact that Pakistan is already a NATO partner gives the Alliance credibility for attempting to engage with both countries. India’s long-standing policy of non-alignment would not be threatened, as visible in cases such as Serbia which is a partner despite formal neutrality. As such, rather than expecting ‘alignment’ against Russia, inviting India as a NATO partner would increase its foreign policy preference of strategic autonomy and serve to limit China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific (Bajpaee and Jie 2025).

Conclusion
NATO’s Deterrence and Defense of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) remains essential for countering Russia, yet its narrow focus on short-term threats leaves the Alliance underprepared for the long-term strategic challenge posed by China and its partners. As Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran increasingly enable Moscow’s aggression, Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security have become inseparable. Closing this gap requires updating DDA to account for external enablers of Russian military power, strengthening safeguards against foreign intelligence penetration, and expanding NATO’s partnerships with Indo-Pacific states facing similar coercive pressures out of Beijing. By integrating these measures, NATO can preserve the credibility of its deterrence posture, address systemic challenges across regions, and ensure that the Alliance remains prepared for a security environment shaped not only by Russia’s actions in Eastern Europe but by the broader network of states supporting them.

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