Support from China and North Korea for Russia amid the conflict with Ukraine highlights the increasingly blurred lines between global regions and underscores the necessity for an international defense strategy, senior security officials remarked on Sunday.
Reportedly, North Korea has deployed troops to the battlefield in Ukraine, while China has provided Russia with economic and technological assistance, opposing global sanctions against Russia.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s foremost defense summit, Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė emphasized that Ukraine’s defeat could have significant repercussions across Asia. She hinted that it might encourage China to pursue its territorial claims over Taiwan and almost the entire South China Sea more aggressively.
“If Russia prevails in Ukraine, it’s not about Europe. It’s not about one region,” she said. “It will send a very clear signal also to smaller states here in Indo-Pacific that anyone can ignore their borders, that any fabricated excuse can justify invasion.”
The comments echoed those from French President Emmanuel Macron as he opened the conference on Friday advocating for greater European engagement in the Indo-Pacific.
On Saturday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested European countries should focus their defense efforts in their own region and leave the Indo-Pacific more to the U.S., but Šakalienė said the regions were clearly intertwined.
“It’s not a secret that when we talk about the main perpetrators in cyber security against Japan it’s China, Russia and North Korea,” she said.
“When we talk about main cyber security perpetrators against Lithuania it’s Russia, China and Belarus — two out of the three are absolutely the same.”
She added that “the convergence of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea into an increasingly coordinated authoritarian axis,” demands a unified response. Iran has been a key supplier of attack drones to Russia for its war effort.
“In this context, the United States’ strategic focus on Indo-Pacific is both justified and necessary, but this is not America’s responsibility alone,” she said.
Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles told reporters on the sidelines that his main takeaway from the three-day conference, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, was the “real intent in the way in which European countries have engaged” in the debates.
“It reflects the sense of connection, interconnectedness … between Indo-Pacific on the one hand and the North Atlantic on the other,” he said.
China sent a lower-level delegation from its National Defense University this year to the conference, but its Foreign Ministry on Sunday responded to comments from Hegseth that Beijing was destabilizing the region and preparing to possibly seize Taiwan by force.
“No country in the world deserves to be called a hegemonic power other than the U.S. itself, who is also the primary factor undermining the peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific,” it said, while reiterating its stance that the Taiwan issue was an internal Chinese matter.
“The U.S. must neve play with fire on this question,” the ministry said.
Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr, whose country has been involved in increasingly violent clashes with China over competing claims in the South China Sea, scoffed at the idea that the U.S. was the problem.
“What the Chinese government considers fair and just may stand in stark contrast to the norms and values accepted by the rest of the world, especially the smaller countries,” he said.
“To envision a China-led international order, we only need to look at how they treat their much smaller neighbors in the South China Sea.”
He also underscored the international implications of the tensions in the Indo-Pacific, noting that the South China Sea was one of several maritime routes that are “arteries of the global economy.”
“Disruption in any of these maritime corridors triggers ripple effects across continents, impacting trade flows, military deployments, and diplomatic posture,” he said.
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