NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday acknowledged the "opportunities and challenges" posed by China's growing global role.
"We have now of course recognized that the rise of China has security implications for all allies," he added.
Beijing's actions abroad add to the challenge of maintaining a united front, and, like Russia, China would welcome internal political tensions that undermine NATO unity.
"All of the things that China is doing through the Belt and Road and the 17+1 add another element of strain to the political cohesion and consensus inside Europe," Kendall-Taylor said.
"The tricky thing with the China question in the European context is there are just such widely divergent views about the nature of the challenge that China poses," Kendall-Taylor added. "Different countries I think have very different perspectives of the challenges that China poses, so I think it is a success that China that is on the agenda for the first time."
The alliance will have to work together to define and articulate its interests in order to defend them, and even then, addressing all aspects of that challenge may be beyond NATO's purview.
"How much of this is a NATO problem or a NATO challenge and how much of this needs to be dealt with more in an EU framework?" Kendall-Taylor said. "When you're thinking about things like infrastructure investments, export controls, investment screening, a lot of those things happens in the EU and at the member-state level."