Communist China’s panic over the North Atlantic Treaty might seem absurd. Then again, too, the comrades have a long memory. Is NATO’s turn to the Pacific stirring echoes of what has been called the alliance’s “Forgotten Counterpart,” the South-East Asian Treaty Organization? Seato was launched in 1954 to curb communism. Unlike NATO, though, Seato failed as an alliance, offering a caution as President Biden pursues a “defensive perimeter” in Asia.

Seato was a “no trespassing” sign warning the communist tyrants at Beijing — and Moscow — against encroaching against free nations in Asia, as Secretary of State Dulles envisioned the pact. Its members pledged themselves to a NATO-like “collective security” against what Seato called “Communist aggression and subversion.” Yet Seato’s fatal flaw — which could haunt Mr. Biden’s plans — was overreliance on American military power.

After all, of the other Seato members — France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan — but two were situated in Southeast Asia. The post-colonial powers had limited resources to offer. France had just lost its colony in Indochina. “The alliance is dedicated to collective defense,” the Times said in 1964, “but its strength rests on United States power” to block a “Communist advance into the treaty area.”

At that time, the Seventh United States Fleet was “the regional policeman,” the Times added, “and both Peking and Hanoi exhibit respect” for America’s “nuclear stick.” No wonder critics mocked Seato as “creaky tiger” and “a paper pact without an armed force of its own,” as the Naval War College’s August Miller explained in 1960. Unlike NATO, Seato “had no independent mechanism,” the State Department said, for “deploying military forces.”

That undermined Dulles’ claims that the Seato alliance was a “deterrent” against Red China. As Dulles himself made clear in 1955, it was the American military, and its willingness to use “new and powerful weapons of precision” — a reference to tactical A-bombs — that kept China at bay when it eyed an invasion of the island democracy of the Republic of China on Taiwan. Seato’s perceived ineffectiveness was one reason the pact disbanded in 1977.

Today, Communist China, a nuclear power, is harder to deter. Yet Mr. Biden’s efforts to contain China risk repeating the errors of Seato. Unlike NATO, which includes H-Bomb powers like Britain and France and other heavily armed nations, the linchpins of Mr. Biden’s Pacific alliance have negligible armies. The Philippines’ military hardly strikes fear at Beijing. Japan’s army operates only defensively. There are questions over Taiwan’s military capabilities.

Enter NATO, which invited to its 75th birthday summit the leaders of America’s top Asian allies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — to attend as observers. Beijing denounced NATO for “extending tentacles” to Asia and liked it even less when the alliance denounced Communist China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies” as an attempt “to undercut and reshape the rules-based international order.”

Beijing in response demanded that NATO “stop interfering in China’s internal politics and smearing China’s image” and urged the North Atlantic alliance not to “create chaos in the Asia-Pacific,” as a foreign ministry spokesman put it. NATO’s increasing interest in Asia comes as the alliance has added two members, Sweden and Finland, and pledges to place Ukraine on an “irreversible path” to membership. It raises concerns over mission confusion.

NATO’s members, for their part, are having enough trouble meeting the alliance’s own targets for defense spending to ward off the threat posed to Europe by a resurgent Russia. What are the budgetary implications if NATO intends to take on the defense of East Asia as well? The failure of Seato stands as a reminder for America and its allies that “collective security” is an empty slogan absent military superiority.