OP-ED: China, a “systemic challenge” that NATO has been referring to since 2021 without ever taking a definitive stance

A historic first in the Alliance’s 73-year history

At the 2022 Madrid Summit, a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO took another significant step: for the first time in the Alliance’s history, China appeared in a Strategic Concept—the founding document that defines security priorities for the coming decade.

This move is not merely symbolic. A Strategic Concept is revised only about once a decade. Including China in it meant acknowledging, in black and white, that the threat was no longer limited to Europe’s eastern border but extended to a geopolitical axis linking Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.

What Madrid Failed to Address

The Madrid Strategic Concept identified the challenge without proposing any binding mechanisms to address it. No coordinated sanctions, no harmonized mechanism for controlling technology exports among all Allies, and no quantified limits on economic exchanges with Beijing.

Four years later, this lack of concrete mechanisms remains the structural weakness of NATO’s doctrine toward China. Identifying a systemic challenge without accompanying it with binding tools is akin to documenting a threat without equipping oneself with the means to contain it.

Including China in the Strategic Concept was a bold move on paper. But a Strategic Concept without coordinated sanctions is like a treasure map without the treasure. The intention was sound; the execution fell short.

“Let’s not be naive,” said the secretary general

At a press conference ahead of the ministerial meeting in Helsingborg on May 20, 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was unusually clear: “Let’s not be naive. What’s going on here? What’s going on is that, essentially since 2022, we’ve seen China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran working closely together.”

This statement, delivered in English to the international press, is not a columnist’s interpretation. It is a direct and verifiable quote from the Atlantic Alliance’s top official, made less than two months before the Ankara summit. It confirms that the doctrine of 2021 and 2022 has lost none of its relevance: on the contrary, it has become even more stringent.

Evidence of China’s economic double-dealing

Mark Rutte added a detail that few Western leaders articulate so directly: “We already knew that China was actively circumventing sanctions by supplying dual-use goods. We already knew this was happening. I have never been naive about China’s role in Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

This statement transforms abstract diplomatic language into a specific accusation: China is not merely watching the war in Ukraine from the sidelines. According to the secretary-general himself, it is supplying dual-use goods that directly fuel the Kremlin’s war machine, while helping Moscow circumvent Western sanctions.

Here is the sentence that really matters in this matter: “I have never been naive.” Rutte isn’t revealing anything new. He is confirming, in 2026, what intelligence agencies have been documenting for years. The question is no longer one of knowing, but of taking action.

Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra: Partners That Have Become Essential

Mark Rutte also revealed that his chief of staff had recently traveled to Japan, that he himself had visited the country a year earlier, and that NATO was engaged in intensive discussions with South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—the informal group known as the Indo-Pacific Four.

This parallel diplomacy, outside the territory covered by Article 5, illustrates just how much NATO now considers European security and Indo-Pacific security to be inextricably linked. A historically transatlantic Alliance is being forced to expand its network of partners far beyond the North Atlantic to contain an axis that, for its part, knows no regional boundaries.

What This Expansion Reveals About Real Priorities

According to Rutte, this cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners focuses on innovation, the defense industrial base, and intelligence sharing—particularly regarding the war in Ukraine. In other words, the Alliance has realized that containing Russia also requires monitoring China’s activities in its immediate vicinity, thousands of kilometers from the Ukrainian theater.

This Indo-Pacific pivot, however, remains a network of dialogue, not a binding defense pact. It reflects a genuine awareness, but does not guarantee any automatic coordinated response in the event of a Chinese escalation around Taiwan.

This pivot toward Tokyo and Seoul is the most honest sign I’ve seen from the Alliance in recent years. But talking to partners is not the same as defending them. The difference between the two will become clear the day China truly tests that limit.

What Rutte Really Wants from This Summit

Regarding the agenda for the Ankara summit, the Secretary General was explicit: “What I’m really hoping for in Ankara is another landmark moment, like the one we had in The Hague. The Hague summit focused on defense spending. The Ankara summit must now focus on making substantial progress in the area of industrial defense production.”

This shift in emphasis—from spending to production—is telling. Following the Hague summit and the historic decision to raise defense spending to 5% of the Allies’ GDP, NATO recognizes that promising money is not enough if Western factories cannot produce the shells, missiles, and air defense systems at the pace demanded by the war in Ukraine.

The Direct Link to Dependence on China

This obsession with industrial production is inextricably linked to the China issue: a large portion of Western defense’s critical supply chains—rare earth metals, electronic components, batteries—depend directly or indirectly on Chinese suppliers. Seeking to quadruple defense production without reducing this dependence is akin to building a fortress with materials supplied by the very adversary it is meant to contain.

Rutte mentioned meetings with private equity firms and the defense industry, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to “quadruple” U.S. defense industry production—a goal the secretary general says he fully supports.

That, in my view, is the real test for Ankara: producing weapons without relying on China to manufacture them. If NATO fails to make this industrial shift, all the talk of a “systemic challenge” will remain mere rhetoric.

Identifying is not the same as sanctioning

Since 2021, NATO has identified China as a systemic challenge on three documented occasions—in Brussels, Madrid, and in Rutte’s statements in 2026—yet none of these statements has been accompanied by coordinated Alliance-wide economic sanctions against Beijing for its support of Russia’s war.

This absence is not an oversight. It reflects an uncomfortable economic reality: several major European Allies still depend heavily on trade with China, making any consensus on coordinated sanctions politically difficult to achieve, even in the face of evidence of circumvention of Russian sanctions.

The Discrepancy Between Words and Deeds

This disconnect between the severity of diplomatic rhetoric and the timidity of concrete action constitutes the central flaw in this doctrine. An Alliance that has been asserting for five years that China threatens the international order, while continuing to import critical technologies on a massive scale from that very country, sends a signal of structural weakness to Beijing as much as to Moscow.

This is not mere hypocrisy. It is the consequence of intertwined economies that make decoupling costly and slow. But this slowness comes at a price, paid every day by Ukrainian soldiers facing Russian weapons systems powered, in part, by Chinese components.

Here is the sentence that should haunt every diplomat present in Ankara: You had five years to turn the phrase “systemic challenge” into policy. The phrase remained just a phrase. Meanwhile, Ukraine has paid the real price for this slowness.

A Commercial Dependency That Is Difficult to Break

Several major European economies, led by Germany, remain deeply tied to exports to China and imports of critical components from that country—a dependency built up over decades that cannot be undone by a summit communiqué, no matter how firm its language may be.

This economic reality largely explains why NATO’s doctrine toward China remains, five years after the Brussels summit, more declarative than binding: a consensus among thirty-two countries on coercive measures against Beijing would require economic sacrifices that not all Allies are prepared to make at the same pace.

U.S. Pressure to Accelerate This Shift

Washington, for its part, has been urging its European allies for several years to reduce this dependence more quickly—an argument that the Trump administration has taken up with insistence, explicitly linking Western defense production to reduced dependence on Chinese supply chains.

This U.S. pressure, if it translates into concrete commitments from Ankara, could mark the first real step toward a doctrine that ceases to be merely a declaration of intent and becomes a full-fledged industrial policy in the face of Beijing.

Here is the blind spot that no one wants to address openly: it is not Brussels’ words that lack courage; it is the economic decisions in Berlin, Paris, and Rome that have been dragging on for five years.

What this timeline documents

From Brussels in 2021 to Madrid in 2022, right up to Mark Rutte’s statements in May 2026 ahead of the Ankara summit, NATO’s doctrine toward China shows remarkable consistency in its assessment and an equally remarkable slowness in taking action. The rhetoric has hardened. The evidence has mounted. Coordinated sanctions, however, remain absent.

The Ankara summit, in the words of its own secretary general, will focus on industrial defense production rather than on another round of rhetoric against Beijing. This may, by implication, be the most honest admission NATO can make: words have reached their limits; only production capacity will truly shift the balance of power.

What to Watch for After Ankara

The true measure of this doctrine’s seriousness will become clear in the months following Ankara: Will the promise to quadruple Western defense production be accompanied by a measurable reduction in dependence on Chinese supply chains? Or will the word “systemic” remain, as it has since 2021, a description without practical consequences?

It is this question—not the final communiqué from Ankara—that will determine whether the West has truly grasped the magnitude of what Mark Rutte himself summed up in a single sentence: not to be naive.

I’ll close this post with a simple conviction: history will not judge NATO by the words it chose to describe China, but by the factories it built to free itself from China.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist