Beijing's Long-Range Missile Test Rattles Western Allies as Russia Reportedly Eyes Poland and NATO's Resolve

 

BEIJING — China fired a long-range ballistic missile from a nuclear-powered submarine into the Pacific Ocean on Monday, the first such test in nearly two years, triggering swift condemnation from New Zealand, Australia and Japan and reviving anxieties across the region about the pace of Beijing’s military expansion.

A submarine of the People’s Liberation Army Navy “launched a strategic missile carrying a dummy warhead toward relevant high seas of the Pacific Ocean, which landed precisely within the designated waters,” said Senior Capt. Wang Xuemeng, a spokesperson for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Beijing did not disclose what type of missile was fired. As CNN noted, the People’s Liberation Army Navy maintains two classes of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the JL-2 and the JL-3, and missile experts say the latter has enough range to strike the continental United States from waters off China’s coast, including the South China Sea — meaning that whichever variant was tested Monday, the underlying capability on display is one that realistically extends the threat envelope to North America itself, not merely to the Indo-Pacific theater.

New Zealand’s foreign minister called the test part of a recurring pattern by China, while Australia’s foreign minister described it as destabilizing to the region.

The test does not stand apart from a broader pressure campaign Beijing has mounted around Taiwan. Xi Jinping used his New Year address to call the island’s reunification with the mainland an unstoppable trend, a speech delivered one day after the Chinese military concluded live-fire war games encircling Taiwan. He has since repeated that resolving the Taiwan question is a historic and unshakable commitment of the Communist Party, language regional analysts say is deliberately eroding the ambiguity Beijing once maintained.

Eight time zones away, a parallel pressure campaign is building against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastern flank. American intelligence has warned Warsaw that Russia may be preparing a provocation designed explicitly to test the alliance’s resolve. A source close to Polish president Karol Nawrocki told the outlet Onet that Washington systematically informs Poland about ever-new Russian plans for a conventional attack on the alliance’s eastern flank. A NATO-country ambassador and an official inside Poland’s defense ministry separately confirmed to reporters that the risk of a Russian provocation against Poland or a Baltic state is serious.

Moscow’s calculation, Polish sources say, is that Warsaw might seek a negotiated withdrawal rather than a military response, letting the Kremlin claim a strategic win while pressing Ukraine’s allies to cut off military aid. The warnings surfaced just ahead of a NATO summit in Turkey.

The Arctic is the quieter third front, and the one where Beijing and Moscow’s interests converge most directly. NATO’s Europe commander has said Russian and Chinese vessels are conducting a growing number of joint patrols, running bathymetric surveys aimed at countering alliance undersea capabilities rather than studying wildlife. A lecturer at China’s National Defense University has said openly that the military can use Arctic security cooperation as cover for reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering, and a NATO-affiliated research paper concludes that Russia’s development of the Northern Sea Route gives Beijing an avenue to introduce military and intelligence assets into the region under civilian cover.

The two powers are not confining their coordination to the high north. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the Chinese and Russian navies will hold joint exercises in the waters and airspace off the Chinese city of Qingdao next week, according to China’s defense ministry and Russian state media. “Following the exercises, some of the forces from both sides will proceed to relevant areas of the Pacific Ocean to carry out joint maritime patrols,” the ministry said in a statement — meaning that within days of Beijing’s submarine-launched missile test, Chinese and Russian warships will be patrolling the same ocean together.

The fracturing of Western cohesion that Moscow and Beijing are testing from the outside may be, in at least one allied capital, being accelerated from within, according to an explosive legal case. As The Bureau reported last month, Raquel Garbers — the principal architect of Canada’s 2024 continental defense policy, Our North, Strong and Free, the framework built to defend the North American Arctic alongside American allies — was fired weeks after publishing an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s anti-American rhetoric was splitting the Western alliance and handing a gift to Beijing and Moscow.

Two days after her warning appeared, Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, stood in Beijing and declared China a strategic partner — a sharp reversal for a government that three years earlier had branded it a “disruptive global power.” Weeks later, Garbers was declared surplus. Her wrongful-dismissal claim, seeking roughly $2 million in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, alleges that rationale was false, and her lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, told The Bureau the case is built to answer who ordered her removed.

The government has not filed a statement of defense, and the allegations have not been tested in court. But the episode lands on the fault line that Monday’s regionally disruptive missile test and Russia and China’s joint exercises and military activities have exposed: as Beijing demonstrates a capability that reaches North America and Chinese and Russian vessels probe the Arctic approaches Canada’s defense policy was written to guard, Ottawa has pivoted toward Beijing — and, Garbers’s claim alleges, silenced the official who warned where that road leads.

Each development has a plausible local explanation on its own: a routine deterrence test, a familiar hybrid-warfare playbook, an incremental polar partnership, a personnel decision in a national capital.

Together they describe something closer to a coordinated stress test of the postwar security order on three fronts at once, arriving as Washington’s bandwidth and credibility are themselves openly debated in allied capitals — and as at least one of those allies moves, by its own government’s declaration, closer to the power conducting the test.

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