The Quad (US, Japan, India, Australia Security Dialogue) : Updates and Discussions

The Quad is finding its purpose, at last​

ON AGAIN, OFF AGAIN for years, the security grouping known as the Quad appears in recent months to be gaining purpose at last. Not least, the two members who are not part of the G7, Australia and India, have been invited to attend that club’s summit in Britain between June 11th and 13th, joining the two who are, America and Japan. A virtual gathering of the Quad’s leaders organised by Joe Biden in March was one of the American president’s first foreign-policy moves. There is talk of the group’s first in-person summit later in the year. Meanwhile, Congress has thrown its weight behind legislation designed to counter China. Among other things, it gives backing to the Quad by boosting co-operation in military and tech matters.

For the Quad’s new purpose has everything to do with China. Four decades of engagement, say some, have not made China a friendlier state nor moderated its behaviour. China’s competitive edge, notes Lisa Curtis, a former American official involved with Indo-Pacific policy and now at the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank in Washington, “has sharpened across the military, economic, diplomatic and technological domains”.
www.economist.com

The Quad is finding its purpose, at last

An informal defensive coalition of four democracies has to prove its mettle
www.economist.com www.economist.com
 
How to Keep India All-In on the Quad

A once-reluctant partner has become a new driver of a critical coalition.​

From left, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison listen during a virtual meeting of the “Quad,” hosted from the White House in Washington on March 12. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images


June 25, 2021, 4:41 PM


This may well be the golden age of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), the strategic grouping joining Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Since its revival in 2017 amid rising shared concerns about China, the group has consistently defied its critics and originally modest expectations. This year, the Quad has not only survived the first major change of government among its members but has thrived—not least because India, originally the most reluctant member, is now all-in on the grouping.

The Biden administration moved quickly to dispel any concerns that it might abandon an initiative championed by its predecessor. One week after inauguration, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan praised the Quad as “a foundation upon which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific region.”

In March, the group took a major step forward with the first-ever Quad summit. Only recently seen as a distant ambition, the four leaders agreed to begin meeting regularly in person, with plans for a first in-person meeting in the fall.

The Quad has been building momentum since 2019, when meetings were upgraded to the ministerial level and counterterrorism exercises were added to the agenda. A Quad-Plus group of seven countries was later formed to coordinate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and last year, the four countries held the first Quad naval exercises in over a decade. At the Quad summit this March, the group pointed to a new focus on pandemic response and vaccines, climate change, and supply chains alongside its legacy commitments to maritime security and a free and open Indo-Pacific.

This flurry of activity and bipartisan support the Quad enjoys in the United States bode well for the group’s future. Yet, the most encouraging omen for the Quad and a major reason for its recent success lies with India’s change of heart. Once skeptical of reviving the group, New Delhi has become a driver of recent progress as it confronts an escalating rivalry with Beijing and declining confidence in its former patron, Moscow.

In a stark reversal from the past, Indian officials are now some of the most vocal champions of the Quad and its conceptual cousin, the Indo-Pacific. They have also begun facing down criticism from Beijing and Moscow head-on. For the Quad to maintain this momentum, India’s partners must recognize the drivers of its recent enthusiasm as well as its concerns and sensitivities about the group’s future trajectory.

The pace of multilateral groups is often set by the most skeptical member, and India, by its own admission, has traditionally been the Quad’s most cautious constituent. After the unceremonious disbanding of the first attempt at a Quad in 2008—when a new government in Australia, intent on engagement with Beijing, signaled its disinterest in the format—New Delhi approached the reconstitution of the group with some trepidation.

A great deal changed in the decade between the Quad’s collapse and rebirth, however, as the push of China and the pull of India’s democratic partners simultaneously grew stronger. On one hand, India experienced growing trust and comfort cooperating with the United States and the other Quad democracies, diminished ideological attachment to its previous Cold War philosophy of nonalignment, and outspoken advocacy for the Quad and Indo-Pacific by the influential Indian minister of external affairs, S. Jaishankar.

At the same time, new rifts opened with China that tipped the scales toward more open rivalry. Arguably the most consequential of these fissures was a series of escalating crises at or near their disputed border, including clashes on the Doklam plateau in 2017 and in Ladakh in 2020. The latter produced the first casualties from border hostilities in more than 40 years.

Whether intentionally or otherwise, China’s aggressive behavior at the Line of Actual Control severely disrupted a delicate balancing act. For India, careful management of the border dispute was the glue holding the volatile relationship together. Now, as Jaishankar said, “if you point your gun at me, I will point my gun at you.”

“China has lost India strategically,” insisted former Indian Ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale. “If they wanted India to play a [neutral] role between them and the U.S., that is not going to happen. India is now firmly with the U.S.”

One consequence of this sea change: Long-standing Chinese propaganda efforts to discourage Indian participation in the Quad are only adding fuel to the fire—not least because the language, which alternates between bullying and patronizing, only ends up emphasizing Chinese threats. In a March column, China’s Global Times warned India’s participation in the Quad meant it had become a “negative asset” to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) groupings led by Beijing and Moscow. It warned India it risked becoming “cannon fodder,” insisting “New Delhi needs to take a more cautious attitude and think twice.”

The threats are falling on deaf ears. “The Chinese are not particularly sensitive to our concerns,” noted former Indian Ambassador to China Ashok Kantha. “Why do we have to be overly concerned about China’s sensitivities with regard to the Quad?” Another former Indian ambassador to China, Vijay Gokhale, saw Beijing’s criticisms of the Quad as contradictory and self-serving: “Contradictory, because China is the initiator of similar plurilateral mechanisms. … Self-serving because China doesn’t wish to permit any other platform that offers alternatives to the region.”

Meanwhile, appeals from India’s traditional patron, Russia, to abandon the Quad and Indo-Pacific don’t hold the same sway they once did. As Moscow embraces a burgeoning strategic partnership with Beijing, Russian officials have grown more publicly critical of India’s tilt toward Indo-Pacific democracies.

The Russian ambassador to India recently explained the Quad would be “detrimental to the inclusive dialogue in the region,” insisting New Delhi instead look to Russian- and Chinese-led exclusive dialogues like the SCO, BRICS, and the Russia-India-China trilateral dialogue.

Similarly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly attacked the Indo-Pacific as “divisive” and designed “to exclude China.” “Our Indians friends are smart enough to understand that,” he advised in 2020.

The Indian government is not in a mood to listen. “Only a person in denial of globalization will actually contest Indo-Pacific,” Jaishankar argued in December 2020, calling it a “matter of satisfaction that the Indo-Pacific concept has gained increasingly wider acceptance.”

Grilled by a Russian reporter on whether the Quad and Indo-Pacific were designed to contain China, the Indian external affairs minister retorted: “Containment is part of your history and thinking. It’s not part of my thinking, OK? You have to get over this Cold War mindset. That era is gone.”

Perhaps most important for India, the Quad and Indo-Pacific have earned the full-throated endorsement of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The “Quad has come of age,” opined Modi at the March Quad summit, calling it “an important pillar of stability in the region.” The four countries, he said, “are united by democratic values and commitment to a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific.” Notably, in the February Biden-Modi phone call, the Indian and U.S. leaders agreed to promote a “stronger regional architecture through the Quad.”

Even as New Delhi moves toward a more enthusiastic embrace of the Quad, it remains in many ways the odd man out and will continue to set the tempo as the group moves from a formative stage to one of consolidation and expansion.

This was expected. In many ways, the story of the Quad is the story of India’s courtship: an attempt to better integrate the country into the network of operational links, shared threat assessments, and common strategic outlooks already binding the United States, Japan, and Australia.

The Quad and Indo-Pacific concepts were initially pioneered by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Tokyo’s zeal for wooing India has diminished little with time. “We love India, and we want more commitment from India towards the Quad,” Japan’s deputy defense minister appealed this year. “I personally request India to commit more to protect the free and open Indo-Pacific region. We want a strong India. India is Asia’s gravity point.”

The sentiment is widely shared in Australia and the United States. Yet, the three countries haven’t entirely acclimated to India’s unique perspective and sensitivities regarding the Quad, which, in fairness, have not always been articulated with great clarity by New Delhi. What are those sensitivities? And what will it take to keep India invested in the Quad?

India’s views of the Quad are a product of its unique position on the geopolitical map: relatively vulnerable and alone on the western flank with its more powerful partners clustered safely together on the eastern flank. India is the only member of the Quad that borders China, has been invaded by China, has an active land border dispute with China, is wedged between two nuclear-armed rivals, and lacks treaty alliance commitments from the other Quad members.

As a result of this relative strategic vulnerability and its unsavory experience with the hastily disbanded Quad 1.0, India is more sensitive to the risks of aggravating a security dilemma with China without a comparable improvement in its strategic position. Were the Quad to dissolve tomorrow, Australia, Japan, and the United States would still enjoy collective defense arrangements and a qualitative military and economic edge over their principle strategic competitor. India would not.

As a result, India seeks to minimize perceptions of the Quad as a U.S.-led containment coalition, both to limit the damage to China-India relations and to enhance the Quad’s broader regionwide appeal. India has long preferred to cast the Quad in a more open, multilateral, and inclusive light. It prioritizes appeals to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN centrality and emphasizes the importance of soft power, non-security cooperation, and diplomatic engagement.

Most importantly, if the principle value of the Quad for Canberra, Tokyo, and Washington lies in fostering greater Indian alignment with their outlook and approach to the Indo-Pacific—and perhaps eventually creating a more formidable deterrent to Chinese adventurism—the principle value of the Quad for New Delhi is helping to address its own strategic shortcomings toward China.

India sees the Quad as one avenue to accelerate its internal balancing and enhance its military capabilities. It endeavors to acquire high-end defense platforms and foster greater cooperation in intelligence- and technology-sharing with its Quad partners. It seeks joint development of defense platforms and greater investments in its indigenous defense sector, which, to date, have been largely stifled by arcane regulations and red tape.

India also seeks greater recognition from the other Quad members for its concerns and interests in the western half of the Indo-Pacific. Privately, a consistent refrain from Indian strategists is the Quad seeks more Indian involvement in confronting China on high-priority issues for Australia, Japan, and the United States: the territorial disputes in the South China and East China Seas, the threats posed by Chinese espionage and technology ambitions, and Chinese repression in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.

By contrast, its Quad partners have not always been comparably engaged with China’s belligerent behavior at the disputed China-India border and its expanding political, military, and economic footprint in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, including its burgeoning strategic partnership with Pakistan. Nor have they proposed a robust agenda for trade and economic development initiatives on the subcontinent.

Those invested in the Quad’s success have much to celebrate this year. But as they look to the future, they need to keep a finger on the pulse in New Delhi and ensure the “Indo” half of the Indo-Pacific does not go neglected.
foreignpolicy.com

How to Keep India All-In on the Quad

A once-reluctant partner has become a new driver of a critical coalition.
foreignpolicy.com foreignpolicy.com
 

Locating Quad in geopolitical history​

For almost six centuries, the leaders of England (and later Great Britain) saw France as their primary strategic challenge. The Anglo-French rivalry was so all-consuming — from the Hundred Years War through the Napoleonic Wars — that it resulted in the consolidation of territory and national identities in both countries, shaped dynastic successions, altered religious and linguistic developments, determined alliances and military involvement, and fuelled colonial competition.


But centuries of rivalry came to an end in 1904, when Britain and France signed a series of agreements, known as the Entente Cordiale. The impetus was the rise of a new European power — Germany — which both France and Britain perceived to be a shared challenge. The Entente Cordiale was not a commitment to each other’s defence. Contradictions remained. Later that year, France’s ally, Russia, and Britain’s ally, Japan, were to wage war against each other. Nonetheless, Germany was sufficiently motivated by the new Anglo-French condominium to attempt to test the Entente. This resulted in a crisis over the status of Morocco, which only brought London and Paris closer.

Understandings such as the Entente Cordiale were, in fact, a common feature of international relations prior to World War II and the nuclear age. The Cold War infused new thinking that alliances had to be credible and watertight to deter adversaries and thereby preserve peace.


Critics argued that this logic was costly, and that it resulted in over-extension, fuelled unnecessary conflict, and gave reason for allies to engage in risky behaviour. Debates about international security commitments — whether in the United States (US) or Europe, or indeed in India or even China — reflect vestiges of these competing worldviews.

But in many respects, we have experienced a reversion to a pre-alliance era. The motivations are different. Democratically elected leaders — or any leadership responsive to its people — will confront difficulties in making open-ended security commitments to another sovereign State.

Publics are more sensitive to the presence of foreign troops on their soil, including the legal complications that might arise. Despite nationalist impulses, public opinion surveys generally reflect a scepticism of overseas military involvements and a preference for greater spending on social welfare and services at a time when defence spending is already at historic lows. (According to the World Bank, 2018 marked the lowest year on record for military expenditure around the world at 2.18% as a proportion of global Gross Domestic Product.)


The need to adapt to new strategic challenges amid fiscal and political constraints is resulting in a return to ententes as an important feature of international relations. Successive governments in the US have now made it clear that the relationship with a non-ally such as India matters much more than some of its formal treaty alliances. Quad — involving India, the US, Japan, and Australia — is emerging as perhaps the most prominent new entente. But the relationship between China and Russia is also exhibiting similar features, much as the China-Pakistan relationship has for decades.

Nonetheless, criticism of these new relationships often continues to raise the bogey of an alliance. For example, some American critics of Quad have implied that this arrangement will somehow contribute to Indian tensions with China and Pakistan, and risks dragging the US into conflicts in the Indian Ocean region. Similarly, Indian critics fear that the US’s free and open Indo-Pacific strategy would entangle India in unnecessary competition in the Pacific.


Such criticism is misleading, and perhaps deliberately so. Priorities will continue to differ among Quad countries. This is clearly reflected in the relative importance India has granted to South Asia and the Indian Ocean when it comes to maritime security, foreign assistance, and vaccine diplomacy.

Ententes are also not useless, as some seem to believe. Those who contend that Quad is simply a talk shop have not been paying sufficient attention to its accompanying activities. Despite last year’s quadrilateral Malabar exercises and the recent announcement of new working groups, Quad cooperation on naval interoperability, critical technologies, and Covid-19 had been manifest previously. Moving forward, arrangements such as Quad could play a pivotal role in coordinating responses, reducing frictions, and enabling participant-States to concentrate more on their core competencies and geographies.


The return of ententes in plain sight (although to little fanfare) reflects the yawning gaps between public opinion, academic scholarship, and actual policy on matters of international relations.

A closer examination of the long history of “strategic partnerships short of mutual defence” would be instructive. For example, the Anglo-French partnership, which became the Triple Entente with the addition of Russia, failed to deter Germany, resulting in the outbreak of World War I. But it contributed significantly to the victorious outcome for its members (although at great cost, especially to Russia and France). By contrast, it was the seemingly more ironclad Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, which crumbled.

The parallel suggests that debates about the wisdom of international partnerships and commitments are unlikely to abate. But a sense of precision and perspective about the nature of new and emerging strategic arrangements is sorely needed.
www.hindustantimes.com

Locating Quad in geopolitical history

Despite last year’s quadrilateral Malabar exercises and the recent announcement of new working groups, Quad cooperation on naval interoperability, critical technologies, and Covid-19 had been manifest previously.
www.hindustantimes.com www.hindustantimes.com
 

Why the Quad Alarms China​

When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.


Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.


As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.


The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”


COME TOGETHER​


Abe’s first attempt to launch the Quad came in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, when Australia, India, Japan, and the United States worked together on a disaster response. Abe saw the Quad as a way to build the four countries’ capacity to work together to meet shared regional security challenges. But the response in other capitals was tentative at best.



In Washington, President George W. Bush worried that such cooperation would unhelpfully alienate China when it needed Beijing in the “war against terrorism”; within a few years, as cables subsequently released by WikiLeaks showed, the administration was privately assuring regional governments that the Quad would never meet. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly ruled out any real security cooperation with the Quad and categorized ties with Beijing as his “imperative necessity.” And in Canberra, the conservative government of John Howard worried about undermining economically beneficial ties with China and also opposed expanding existing trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan by adding India; in July 2007, Australia formally withdrew and announced the decision in Beijing soon after. When Abe, the driving force behind the Quad, unexpectedly resigned, in September 2007 (before becoming prime minister again in 2012), his successor, Yasuo Fukuda, formally consigned the Quad to the dustbin of history.


When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”




The Quad is one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
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Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)


Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.


FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK​


At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.


Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).



Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.


But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.


By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.


The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”




Beijing has moved to full-scale political attack.
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Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.


Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”


REASON TO WORRY​


China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threaten Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.


But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.



One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.

China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.

The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.

Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
www.foreignaffairs.com

Why the Quad Alarms China

The Quad's success poses a major threat to Beijing’s ambitions.
www.foreignaffairs.com www.foreignaffairs.com
RISING SUN said:

Why the Quad Alarms China​

When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.


Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.


As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.


The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”


COME TOGETHER​


Abe’s first attempt to launch the Quad came in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, when Australia, India, Japan, and the United States worked together on a disaster response. Abe saw the Quad as a way to build the four countries’ capacity to work together to meet shared regional security challenges. But the response in other capitals was tentative at best.



In Washington, President George W. Bush worried that such cooperation would unhelpfully alienate China when it needed Beijing in the “war against terrorism”; within a few years, as cables subsequently released by WikiLeaks showed, the administration was privately assuring regional governments that the Quad would never meet. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly ruled out any real security cooperation with the Quad and categorized ties with Beijing as his “imperative necessity.” And in Canberra, the conservative government of John Howard worried about undermining economically beneficial ties with China and also opposed expanding existing trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan by adding India; in July 2007, Australia formally withdrew and announced the decision in Beijing soon after. When Abe, the driving force behind the Quad, unexpectedly resigned, in September 2007 (before becoming prime minister again in 2012), his successor, Yasuo Fukuda, formally consigned the Quad to the dustbin of history.


When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”






Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)


Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.


FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK​


At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.


Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).



Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.


But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.


By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.


The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”






Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.


Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”


REASON TO WORRY​


China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threaten Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.


But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.



One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.

China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.

The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.

Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
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Why the Quad Alarms China

The Quad's success poses a major threat to Beijing’s ambitions.
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"Under PM Modi, India Has Revived Quad," Says Australian Diplomat: Report​

Sydney:
Trade deals are about politics as much as economics, a swift deal between India and Australia would be an important sign of the democratic world's tilt away from China, said Australian Prime Minister's Special Trade Envoy Tony Abbott.

In an article published in The Australian newspaper, Abbott said: "Trade deals are about politics as much as economics, a swift deal between India and Australia would be an important sign of democratic world's tilt away from China, as well as boosting the long-term prosperity of both our countries."

Abbott further said that India is currently its seventh-biggest trade partner with annual two-way trade of about 30 billion dollars, despite being hampered by tariffs and mutual perceptions that neither country is always a good place to do business. Both countries are now boosting their negotiating teams with a view to having an "early harvest" trade agreement at least by the end of the year, as a big step towards a much deeper partnership.

He added that with the world's other emerging superpower becoming more belligerent almost by the day, it's in everyone's interests that India take its rightful place among the nations as quickly as possible.

He said that under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has revived the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and the first in-person Quad summit is expected before the end of the year.

"India and Australia are like-minded democracies whose relationship had been under-developed, at least until Narendra Modi became India's Prime Minister. Under (PM) Modi, India has revived the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and the first in-person Quad summit is expected before the end of the year," he said.


"Under (PM) Modi, India has invited Australia to join the annual Malabar naval exercises that will soon involve India, the United States, Japan, Australia and also the United Kingdom's visiting carrier strike group led by the Royal Navy's new flagship HMS Queen Elizabeth. It will be an impressive show of strength, demonstrating the democracies' commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific," he added.

He also said that the basic problem is that China's daunting power is a consequence of the free world's decision to invite a communist dictatorship into global trading networks.

"Back then, the assumption was that rising prosperity and more economic freedom would lead, eventually, to political liberalisation too. Certainly, that was my view in 2014 when we finalised China''s first trade deal with a G20 economy. Subsequently, our exports to China did indeed grow, even faster than theirs to us; but the current capricious boycotts of Australian coal, barley, wine and seafood show that, for the Beijing regime, trade is used as a strategic weapon," Abbott said.

China has exploited the West's goodwill and wishful thinking to steal its technology and undercut its industries; and, in the process, become a much more powerful competitor than the old Soviet Union ever was, because it's now a first-rate economy that's rapidly developing a military to match; and spoiling for a fight over Taiwan, a pluralist democracy of 25 million that's living proof there's no totalitarian gene in the Chinese DNA, the article published in The Australian newspaper said.
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"Under PM Modi, India Has Revived Quad," Says Australian Diplomat: Report

Trade deals are about politics as much as economics, a swift deal between India and Australia would be an important sign of the democratic world's tilt away from China, said Australian Prime Minister's Special Trade Envoy Tony Abbott.
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