NATO has 32 members, all of them in North America or Europe, and a foundational treaty whose geographic scope is the North Atlantic. It is not, by any structural definition, an Indo-Pacific organisation. And yet the July 2024 Washington Summit — the third consecutive NATO summit attended by the Indo-Pacific Four (IP-4: Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) — confirmed a trajectory that is reshaping the alliance's strategic orientation and its relevance to India's security environment.

NATO's Indo-Pacific turn is not driven by altruism or geographic ambition. It is driven by the recognition — increasingly shared across the alliance's membership — that the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres is indivisible. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that European security cannot be taken for granted. China's support for Russia, its military build-up in the Indo-Pacific, and its economic leverage over NATO members have made Beijing a NATO-level concern for the first time. The IP-4's inclusion in NATO summits is the institutional expression of this indivisibility thesis.

NATO's China Problem — And India's Opportunity

NATO's 2022 Strategic Concept named China as a "systemic challenge" — the first time the alliance's foundational document has addressed Beijing explicitly. This was a significant departure: for most of NATO's history, China was outside the alliance's strategic vocabulary. The evolution from 2022's "systemic challenge" to the increasingly direct language of subsequent summits reflects a European security community that has absorbed the lessons of Russian aggression and applied them to the Chinese model of authoritarian revisionism.

For India, NATO's China focus creates an opportunity that is more significant than the formal institutional relationship suggests. India's bilateral security relationships with NATO members — the US-India Major Defence Partnership, the India-France Strategic Partnership, the India-UK Defence and International Security Partnership, and the deepening India-Germany defence technology conversations — are all strengthened by NATO's collective turn toward China. When European defence ministries are building China into their threat assessments and their procurement planning, they are also building India — the world's largest democracy on China's strategic frontier — into their partner calculus.

The Nordic-Baltic dimension of NATO's recent expansion also has an indirect India relevance: Finland and Sweden's accession, completed in 2023 and 2024 respectively, extends NATO's northern flank into the Arctic — a theatre where India, as an observer in the Arctic Council, has growing strategic interests in the governance of shipping routes and resources that climate change is making accessible. NATO's Arctic posture and India's Arctic engagement are not yet explicitly coordinated, but the shared interest in rules-based governance of a newly strategic commons creates a basis for engagement.

The NATO-India Relationship: What It Is and Is Not

India's formal relationship with NATO is minimal. New Delhi held its first political dialogue with the alliance in Brussels in December 2019. It is not a NATO partner nation, not a member of any NATO framework programme, and has consistently declined the alliance's overtures — including a 2011 invitation to participate in NATO's Ballistic Missile Defence system — on the grounds of strategic autonomy.

The reasons are structural. India's non-alignment heritage, its Russia relationship, its refusal to join formal military alliances, and its calculation that NATO membership would entangle it in Euro-Atlantic security commitments that are peripheral to its core strategic concerns in the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean all militate against formal NATO engagement. A NATO partnership framework that required India to align its positions on Ukraine, on sanctions, or on NATO's collective deterrence posture would be incompatible with India's strategic autonomy in ways that no Indian government could accept.

What India and NATO can have — and are building — is a practical cooperation relationship on specific issues: counterterrorism intelligence sharing, maritime security coordination, cybersecurity capacity, and the defence industrial partnerships that NATO member states and India are deepening bilaterally. This is not alliance membership. It is issue-based alignment — and it is consistent with India's strategic interests in the current moment.

NATO's growing Indo-Pacific orientation creates more contact points between the alliance's agenda and India's security concerns than existed a decade ago. India should engage those contact points selectively, pragmatically, and without the strategic confusion that formal partnership frameworks would create.

The Hind covers policy, power, and strategic affairs from India's perspective. Views expressed are analytical and editorial.