A Muscular NATO Confronts Russia and China

· Putin Meets Central Asia Leaders to Build Alliances

NATO leaders on Wednesday outlined a muscular new vision that names Moscow as the military alliance’s primary adversary but also, for the first time, China is declared to be a strategic “challenge.”

In the Cold War but came to view a post-Soviet Russia as a potential ally, and did not focus on China at all.

But that was before Feb. 24, when Russian forces poured across the border into Ukraine, and Chinese leaders pointedly did not join in the global condemnation that followed.

“The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests,” NATO leaders said in a new mission statement issued during their summit in Madrid.

In a flurry of steps at the summit in Madrid, which ends Thursday, President Biden and other NATO leaders sought to respond to President Vladimir V. Putin’s resurgent and bellicose Russia. Just before publishing the mission statement, they extended formal membership invitations to the until-now nonaligned Nordic countries Finland and Sweden, paving the way for NATO’s most significant enlargement in more than a decade.

China offered a chilly response to the new NATO moves.

“We oppose certain elements clamoring for NATO’s involvement in Asia Pacific, or an Asia Pacific version of NATO based on military alliance,” said China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun. “The outdated Cold War script must not be reenacted in Asia Pacific. The turmoil in parts of the world must not be allowed in Asia Pacific.”

For his part, Mr. Putin kept his attention in Central Asia, where he has been visiting to shore up support for Moscow — all the more important now that the West has moved to make Russia a pariah nation.

In an apparently calculated bit of Kremlin counterprogramming, the Russian president attended a summit of his own: a gathering in Turkmenistan of the five countries bordering the Caspian Sea. He flew to Turkmenistan early Wednesday from Tajikistan, on the second leg of a two-day trip that took him out of Russia for the first time since the Ukraine war began in February. It was also his first overnight foreign trip since the pandemic began.

In a brief speech to the other leaders at the summit, including the presidents of Kazakhstan, Iran and Azerbaijan, Mr. Putin spoke of trade, tourism, fisheries and environmental issues, though he said not a word about NATO or Ukraine.

But later in the day, meeting with reporters after the summit was over, Mr. Putin scoffed at the significance of Finland and Sweden joining NATO — all the while issuing a warning.

“If military contingents and infrastructure are deployed there,” he said, “we will have to respond in kind and create the same threats against the territories from which threats are created against us,” Mr. Putin said. “It’s obvious. What, don’t they understand?”

The expansion of NATO came after protracted negotiations with Turkey, a member of the alliance that had raised objections. Although it was still unclear Wednesday exactly what had persuaded Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to alter his stance, clues emerged. Some involved Turkey’s concerns about Kurdish separatists.

Ann Linde, the Swedish foreign minister, said that Sweden and Finland had formally agreed not to lend support to Kurdish or other organizations that could harm Turkey’s security, whether with weapons or other aid.

“We don’t do that today either, but now it’s explicitly written,” Ms. Linde told Swedish Radio. She said her country would continue to provide humanitarian support to Kurds and others in northeastern Syria.

Both Sweden and Finland will also lift an informal arms embargo on Turkey imposed in 2019 after Turkey had intervened in northern Syria. As new members of NATO, Ms. Linde said, both countries would have “new commitments vis-à-vis allies, and this applies to Turkey as well.”

And the United States on Wednesday signaled a new willingness to sell upgraded F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, moving closer to satisfying the ally’s longstanding request.

American officials insisted the change was unrelated to the NATO expansion.