For the first time in four years, the leaders of South Korea and Japan were nowhere to be seen at the annual Nato summit.
Australia’s prime minister was also absent from The Hague but New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon took part in the meeting.
The four countries are not Nato members, but the security bloc has identified Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand – also known as the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) – as key partners in the alliance’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific region.
Leaders of all four countries had attended annual Nato summits since 2022, at the invitation of the alliance, but this year, Japan, South Korea and Australia sent lower-level representatives to the event.
The decision reflects higher priorities in a region concerned that Middle East conflicts could be distracting the United States from the Indo-Pacific, at least in the short term, experts say.
Two leaders – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung – rejected Nato’s invitation, citing as reasons “domestic priorities and growing uncertainty in the Middle East”.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who initially accepted the invitation, cancelled his trip to The Hague a day before his departure, reportedly because there was little chance of a meeting with US President Donald Trump.
Richard Marles, Australia’s deputy prime minister and defence minister, sought to reassure Nato of its ties with the IP4 by saying he “would not overread” the absence of the three heads of state.
He added that Europe now “matters more” for his region than it did five to 10 years ago, adding that Australia’s prime minister had attended the previous three summits.
“As I’ve spoken to European countries today, they are very keen to pursue their alliance arrangements with the United States in this moment,” Marles said.
Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, who on Tuesday hosted a meeting with Luxon and met delegates from four countries on Wednesday, also stressed the importance of relations with the Indo-Pacific countries, calling the IP4 “friends”.
“There is a lot of use and importance in making a joint analysis of the security threats facing us here in the Euro-Atlantic and what is happening in the Indo-Pacific, knowing that these two areas, two theatres, are getting more interconnected,” Rutte said, before the meeting with the representatives of IP4 countries.
He said that all Indo-Pacific partners had defence industrial bases that the alliance could work with for joint procurement and innovation, as seen from the war in Ukraine in areas such as drone technology and artificial intelligence.
Despite the remarks, last week’s Nato summit showed less focus on the Indo-Pacific region than in previous years.
Liselotte Odgaard, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, said the absence of South Korea and Japan from the gathering was a signal that their focus on the US took precedence over engagement with Nato.
“That is what gives them long-term security … Here you can see again they are focused on engaging with the US. So Europe and the Asian allies, partners, have some of the same problems with worrying that the US will not come to their assistance,” Odgaard said.
At this year’s summit, the priority was to increase Nato’s defence capabilities, including commitments from member states to boost their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP. Members were also focused on the intensified military confrontations in Ukraine and the Middle East, raising concerns that less attention was being paid to the Indo-Pacific region, which is itself focused on defence.
Analysts said that Europe and the IP4 countries were looking to secure Washington’s assurance of their defence against threats from China and Russia in their respective regions, especially since US attention had recently shifted to the Middle East.
Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow and SK-Korea Foundation chair of Korea studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, said US strikes against Iran had shifted US military assets and diplomatic attention to the Middle East, and given the limited resources, “it is hard not to think that the US is being pulled back to the Middle East and away from the Indo-Pacific region”.
“The linkages that have grown between Nato and the IP4 are fruitful and sufficiently robust, so I believe Japan and [South Korea] will still want to engage Nato,” Yeo said.
“However, growing conflict in the Middle East and tensions within the transatlantic alliance created by the Trump administration will slow the momentum of the cross-regional linkages between Europe and Asia that had accelerated since 2022.”
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, said Lee and Ishiba would have attended the Nato summit if “the US hadn’t launched a strike on Iran”, making the Indo-Pacific a “secondary focus of the summit this year”.
“Thus, it did not make much sense for the South Korean and Japanese leaders to attend,” he said.
However, the engagement of both countries with Nato would continue to grow, with the situation in the Middle East reinforcing cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo on the one hand and Nato on the other, he added.
“The two of them strengthened their ties with Nato during the first Trump administration, both at the working and at the ministerial level. And both of them benefit hugely from this cooperation in practical terms. So they have many incentives to continue to work together with Nato,” Pacheco Pardo said.
“As for China, I assume that it will continue to be worried, since South Korea and Japan continue to participate in Nato summits and Nato-IP4 cooperation continues to strengthen. This is worrying for the Chinese government.”
Henry Haggard, a former US diplomat and a senior adviser at Washington-based consulting firm WestExec Advisers, said while it was hard to say what Lee’s and Ishiba’s motivations were, Seoul and Tokyo would make it their “paramount” priorities to secure a “stable path forward for their trade relationships with the United States”.
“Therefore, if either Seoul or Tokyo suggested they could focus more on trade discussions by forgoing Nato, that would make a lot of sense to me,” Haggard said.
“The ongoing situation in the Middle East would likely result in more US focus on the Middle East and less on the Indo-Pacific. This underscores the increased importance of strong relationships with allies like [South] Korea, Japan and Australia.”
Haggard added that South Korea and Japan would continue to engage with Nato because of their “understandings of the global nature of threats facing like-minded countries from China, Russia and non-state actors”.
He also said that China would “likely seek to exploit” the absence of the two countries from the summit.
Their absence may have also been due to perceptions that US interest in Nato was declining.
Odgaard said that the participation of South Korea and Japan at the Nato summits was “not so much about European-Asian cooperation”, but instead more about attracting US attention.
“Why don’t [the Indo-Pacific leaders] come? Well, they can see the US does not prioritise the Nato summit, so why should Japan and South Korea come here? … I think it is all to do with a lack of major US interest in the summit.”
Their absence “speaks to Nato’s relative decline in importance for the US, and therefore, for its allies”, Odgaard said, citing that there was a lack of agenda items addressing regions other than Europe and the war in Ukraine, such as the Indo-Pacific or the Middle East.
Yeo agreed.
“The low probability of any of the IP4 leaders getting a chance to meet with Trump individually – particularly South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung and Australia’s Anthony Albanese, who were unable to meet Trump at the G7 earlier this month – was probably an important factor in tipping the scales against attending the Nato summit,” Yeo said.