The North Atlantic Treaty Organization seems to have put its plan of setting up a liaison office in Tokyo on hold, at least until autumn. Yet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's participation in the transatlantic alliance's summit in Lithuania on July 11 and 12 sends a strong signal that the two sides are willing to further deepen their engagement.

According to reports by Reuters and Agence France-Presse, NATO intended to include the plan of setting up a liaison office in Japan in the statement it released after the gathering of NATO leaders in Vilnius. That it didn't was apparently due to the strong objection of France.

Amid their anxieties at what has come to pass because of the organization's relentless pressure on Russia, the European members have flocked to the shelter of the US security umbrella. This has allowed mischief to grow within the organization. The reins are firmly held in the hands of Washington, and it sees but one point on the compass.

True, the US' permanent representative to NATO Julianne Smith said at the gathering that the organization was "not adding members from the Indo-Pacific," and the NATO's focus on challenges posed by China does not signal an intention to invite Asian nations to join the bloc. But the proposed liaison office is undoubtedly a result of the encouragement Tokyo has received from Washington. It wants Tokyo to become a bigger player in its "Indo-Pacific strategy" aimed at containing China. In view of that, rather than defining the limits of NATO's outreach in the "Indo-Pacific", as Smith claimed, the US is strengthening NATO's outreach in the region.

In interviews on Sunday, both Republican Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska, who was part of a US delegation that attended the summit, and Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth from Illinois, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, were more frank, saying that NATO's expansion into Asia is inevitable.

Sullivan even saw it as "progress" that the NATO statement mentioned China "almost 20 times" and that the organization had invited the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea to take part in the summit.

China has a different view of course. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that although the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, NATO still holds the zero-sum and confrontational mentality that were products of that time. In seeking to reverse the wheel of history, it is acting against the trend of the times and the will of much of the international community, he stressed.

Whether the other NATO members will heed those words or continue on the course laid out for it by Washington will have a great bearing on what transpires in Asia in the near future.