NATO’s securitisation of China in the North Atlantic: order-shaping without hegemony

This article investigates NATO’s securitisation of China in the North Atlantic, in light of China’s wider maritime projection. Although scholars have paid attention to NATO’s adaptation and to China’s growing influence, there is still limited research on how China has been presented as a security concern, given the absence of direct military conflict and the role of infrastructural interdependence. Based on this gap, the article asks how NATO has securitised China in the North Atlantic between 2014 and 2025, a period that captures the strategic evolution from NATO’s post-2014 reorientation to China’s consolidation as a systemic challenge. The aim is to examine NATO’s threat narratives, to understand this process using securitisation theory, and to assess the consequences for North Atlantic security governance. The study draws on qualitative discourse analysis of NATO documents and interviews with experts, as well as secondary literature. Based on securitisation theory, it conceptualises NATO’s approach as a staged, path-dependent and multilayered process across domains of discourse, institutions, economy and technology. It concludes that NATO is not securitising China as an imminent military threat but as a structural actor that builds strategic dependencies on the Allies’ critical infrastructure and technologies, through a dynamic of order-shaping without hegemony.