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The confluence of forces built around shared unease and growing anxiety over the implications of China’s rapid military expansion, salami-slicing territorial creep and ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy is fertile ground for the revival of the quadrilateral security dialogue (Quad) between Australia, India, Japan and the US. The four democracies share the strategic assessment of China as a disruptive force in the Indo-Pacific.

Quad 1.0 was interred in 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, bowing to China’s sensitivities, pulled Australia out. The concept went on hold with Shinzo Abe’s loss of office in Japan, the advent of the Obama administration in the US, and the anti-American bent of Manmohan Singh’s communist party and other left-leaning allies in India.

As part of a fundamental reorientation of India’s foreign policy, PM Narendra Modi began aggressively pursuing diplomatic initiatives to the east, including investing in personalised diplomacy with China’s President Xi Jinping as well as with Abe. Australia’s unease has been rising over aspects of China’s behaviour in the region and interference in Australian politics and public life. The Trump administration has identified China as the top US security threat. And Japan is trying desperately to adjust to the shape of Asia’s new cold war.

China’s re-emergence as a comprehensive national power raises multiple points of concern that provide the backdrop to the fresh interest in Quad 2.0. China has morphed from its historical identity as a continental power into a modern maritime power with growing power-projection capability across the Indo-Pacific. It has followed a string-of-pearls strategy in the Indian Ocean, backed by a growing naval capability, to choke India around its littoral and to check it on land by courting Nepal and its all-weather friend Pakistan. It has engaged in assertive behaviour in the East and South China seas to build sprawling, interlinked militarised facilities on remote and uninhabited islands—many of them disputed on ownership—to challenge US strategic primacy.

Shashi Tharoor, former chair of India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, rightly notes that the 15 June military clash with China in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh presents India with the stark choice of capitulating to China’s military blackmail or embracing the US free of the historical burden of anti-Americanism. Gautam Bambawale, the recently retired Indian ambassador to China, thinks the clash will mark the date on which China finally ‘lost India’ strategically.

Australia’s former ambassador to China Geoff Raby notes: ‘[A] series of important announcements … have made it clear that the Australian government now regards China as a strategic competitor and a revisionist power that must be resisted.’ China’s retaliatory measures against Australia include impediments on beef, barley, students and tourists, as well as aggressive statements from Chinese diplomats.

On 30 June, after China enacted a sweeping new national security law for Hong Kong, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called the move ikan (regrettable), which is just one step short of the most critical word in the Japanese diplomatic lexicon, hinan (denounce). As the situation in Hong Kong gradually deteriorated, Japanese officials had used incrementally stronger words—from chūshi (closely monitoring) to yūryo (seriously concerned).

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations issued an unusually tough statement on China on 27 June reaffirming the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as the proper basis of sovereign rights and entitlements in the disputed South China Sea.

On 13 July, following the dispatch of two aircraft carriers to take part in one of the largest naval exercises in recent years in the South China Sea, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out China’s behaviour as illegal in a rare direct challenge to Beijing. ‘The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire’, he said. Full-spectrum China–US strategic jostling will peel away the layers of safety nets against deliberate or inadvertent military conflict.

Australia, Japan and the US were drawn to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ conceptual frame as a convenient analytical tool to incorporate India into their strategic calculus. It integrates geography, the ‘free and open’ principle and democratic values into one strategic construct.

However, the level and quality of economic interaction of the four Quad partners with China vary enormously, as do their territorial disputes and their fears of entanglement in others’ quarrels. There can be no expectation of automatic military assistance in any armed conflict with China arising from the territorial disputes between Japan and China and between India and China. The volatility and erratic decision-making style of the Trump administration and its transactional approach to foreign policy raise doubts about the reliability of its security guarantee. All this explains the wariness towards the Quad by the partners. That is likely to subside in the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

The origins of the Quad are entirely benign. After the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, the four navies closely coordinated disaster relief operations and gradually consolidated habits of cooperation in the vast maritime space of the Indo-Pacific. Even today there is no appetite among any of the four for an upgrade of the Quad from a web of intersecting bilateral-cum-trilateral relationships resting on shared strategic worldviews and promoting habits of cooperation to a hard-edged anti-China security alliance.

However, caught between an increasingly assertive and bellicose China and a US that grows more unpredictable and less reliable by the month, Australia, India and Japan are having to ‘thread the needle’ of a fraught future for the Indo-Pacific amid the collapsing pillars of the liberal international order. Nevertheless, while the stated message is an informal security dialogue, the message as received in Beijing is that the Quad is a coalition to contain China.

To understand why, China’s leaders might want to hold their statements and actions to the mirror.

The ongoing standoff between Chinese and Indian forces along the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border recently resulted in the first troop casualties there in decades, with some Indian soldiers killed in particularly brutal fashion. The intensity of China’s multiple cross-border incursions suggests approval from the highest levels of the Chinese government.

Satellite pictures confirm that Chinese forces have occupied at least 60 square kilometres of territory that India claims as its own. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has downplayed this uncomfortable reality, perhaps out of concern that publicly acknowledging the truth would inflame domestic public opinion and fuel a highly undesirable escalation of tensions. A less benign interpretation, however, is that the government is embarrassed, because its claim to be more muscular than its predecessor in confronting external aggression has been proven hollow.

But China’s recent sabre-rattling may paradoxically benefit India by jolting it out of one of its periodic stupors. After its disastrous 1962 war with China, for example, India undertook a sweeping modernisation of its military and subsequently won a decisive victory in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War.

Similarly, after its own misguided economic policies raised the spectre of mass starvation in 1966–67, India launched the ‘green revolution’, and today has nearly 100 million tons of grain stocks. And, following its massive balance-of-payments crisis in 1989–91, India initiated a historic economic liberalisation program that ushered in a quarter of a century of unprecedentedly rapid growth.

In each case, a crisis served as a kick in the pants. China has now delivered another. The Chinese Communist Party has been adept at leveraging the country’s humiliation at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century to drive domestic change while preserving its own political monopoly. But the CCP’s recent aggressive behaviour towards India mimics that of China’s former imperial masters—and will likely have similar consequences.

First, China’s show of force will set back its relations with India by decades. Since the turn of the century, Indian policymakers have wrung their hands over how to handle China’s extraordinary rise. They are well aware of how China has sought to stymie India, whether by offering neighbouring Pakistan carte blanche regarding cross-border terrorism, blocking India in different international forums, or making strategic inroads in its neighbourhood. But Indian governments, recognising their country’s weakness, have been loath to poke the dragon with which it shares a border more than 4,000 kilometres long.

India will now be less inhibited about deepening ties with the other three members of the ‘Quad’ (Australia, Japan and the United States) and more forcefully embracing the ‘Indo-Pacific’ concept. And it will be increasingly wary of participating in Chinese-led multilateral forums, and, where possible, will seek to hinder China’s efforts to establish a Sinosphere.

Second, it has become abundantly clear that India’s military inferiority to China reflects a widening economic gap. The previous Indian government, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, raised the economy to new heights in its first term (2004–09), and lowered it to new depths in its second (2009–14). But, under Modi, India’s economy has been spinning its wheels, and reform has now become an existential necessity for national security.

Third, India will now accelerate military changes. Although Modi’s government loves to talk tough, military expenditures have declined from 2.9% of GDP in 2009 to 2.4% last year.

The government’s populist policy of sharply raising armed forces pensions has meant that India’s defence budget this year allocated more money to military retirement benefits than to salaries. Indeed, defence pensions as a share of non-pension defence spending has quadrupled, from less than 10% in the late 1980s to more than 40% this year. And with salaries and pensions accounting for nearly three-fifths of Indian defence spending, there is little left to invest in modernisation. Whereas China spends more than two-fifths of its defence budget on modernisation, and Pakistan more than one-third, the share in India’s case is barely one-quarter.

Finally, while Modi’s ruling party has polarised Indian society around religion, China has now inadvertently supplied the glue to bind Indians together—if only in shared hostility. Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to have a unique ability in that regard.

For example, Australians’ trust in China has fallen to its lowest ever level. Australia, as much as any Western country, had previously sought strong ties with China. But when the Australian government called earlier this year for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, China retaliated by blocking Australian imports, underscoring the degree to which it is now using economic coercion against its critics.

Likewise, a Pew Research Center survey in March found that a record 66% of Americans had an unfavourable view of China. And China’s aggressive stance towards Hong Kong ensured that incumbent Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen comfortably won re-election in January, after the opposition Kuomintang had seemed poised to win on a platform of closer economic links with China.

Of course, India being India, there will be no seismic changes. But the country’s foreign policy and the direction of its economic and military reforms will increasingly reflect the challenge posed by China, which Indians now regard as their principal enemy. Ironically, as India seeks to escape China’s shadow, it will have its powerful neighbour to thank for finally triggering changes that should have happened long ago.

The recent developments in Ladakh on the disputed border between India and China were shocking and tragic. The clash in Galwan Valley last week has opened up a deep fissure in India–China ties, spawning tensions that could even escalate into an all-out-war. The latest reports suggest the Indian armed forces have begun a rapid mobilisation and the Chinese military has been shoring up its positions, even as political efforts are on to defuse the crisis.

With a spiral of escalation building, a conflict so far limited to the Line of Actual Control with China could see other theatres open up, including one in the Indian Ocean. Unlike on the land border, where China has a relative advantage of terrain, military infrastructure and troop strength, India is better placed at sea. In the Eastern Indian Ocean through which most of China’s cargo and energy shipments pass, the Indian Navy is the dominant force.

In recent years, the Indian Navy has sought to consolidate strength in India’s near seas through its mission-based deployments. Since 2017, Indian warships have patrolled Indian Ocean sea lanes and choke points, including the approaches to the Malacca Strait. In its bid to keep track of Chinese submarines in the Eastern Indian Ocean, the Indian Navy has also been operating P-8I maritime patrol aircraft from the Andaman Islands. A chain of radar stations along the Indian coast has helped in providing better information about maritime movements, and a fusion centre in Gurgaon near New Delhi is helping manage tactical information in the near seas.

China, too, has been probing the subcontinental littorals. Since 2013, when it first sent a submarine to Sri Lanka, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has significantly expanded its military and civilian expeditions in South Asia. In recent months, China has sent intelligence ships and survey and research vessels into the Andaman Sea, attempting to track Indian naval activity in the region. While it has so far desisted from challenging the Indian Navy, the PLAN’s pattern of deployment suggests an aspiration for a sustained presence in areas of overlapping interest with India.

Three aspects about a possible India–China maritime conflict seem relevant. First, unlike with Pakistan, when the Indian Navy established a loose blockade in the northern Arabian Sea during Operation Talwar in 1999 and Operation Parakram in 2001, and again after the Balakot attack last year, an aggressive barricading approach in China’s near seas would be unviable. India has virtually no presence east of Malacca, and unless it acts in concert with the US, Vietnam and Japan in the Pacific littorals, the Indian Navy cannot hope to take on the PLAN in its backyard.

What seems more realistic is an interdiction strategy aimed at choking Chinese trade passing through the Indian Ocean sea lines of communication. A vast majority of China’s oil shipments, container vessels and bulk cargo traffic approaches the Malacca Strait through the 10 degree channel between Andaman and Nicobar. Observers say the Indian Navy could stifle the flow of Chinese traffic, while aggressively patrolling the Indian Ocean chokepoints, keeping an eye on Chinese naval reinforcements.

Here too, however, there are likely to be complications. With a significant share of seaborne trade moving in Chinese-flagged vessels, an Indian interdiction strategy could result in regional blowback against New Delhi. Many Indo-Pacific states would view India’s disruption of regular shipping in an international sea lane as a hostile act that imposes unacceptable costs on neutrals. To avoid such a scenario, Indian warships will need to be careful in targeting Chinese-flagged vessels, and refrain from the unnecessary use of force.

Second, the Indian Navy will need to focus on denying the PLAN tactical space in India’s near littorals. Through the use of submarines and anti-submarine-warfare-capable air assets, India would seek to restrict China’s freedom of operation in the littorals. Part of the strategy would be to position Indian naval assets on the east coast and in the Andaman island bases to keep up a high tempo of operations in regional hotspots.

Denying China use of India’s near seas won’t be easy. With a vast fleet comprising nuclear attack submarines, guided missile warships, amphibious carriers and a host of other capable war-fighting platforms, the PLAN is the world’s second most powerful navy, and should not be underestimated. But it is constrained by the absence of operational logistics, ship-based air cover and land-based maritime reconnaissance capabilities in the Indian Ocean—gaps that the Indian Navy would hope to exploit.

Third, India should expect China to use its Belt and Road Initiative in South Asia to reduce its tactical deficit in the Indian Ocean. In Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Myanmar, where China is building maritime infrastructure, the PLAN is likely to press for a greater presence to overcome logistical constraints in the Indian Ocean. Already China is constructing a naval base for Bangladesh in Cox’s Bazar that could be used to position naval ships and store military supplies.

The imperative for India is to track Chinese naval activity and warship movements along the Bay of Bengal rim. As it seeks to expand basing facilities for submarines and ASW aircraft in the Andaman Islands, the Indian Navy would look to position long-range surface-to-surface missiles on the island chain to more directly threaten Chinese naval deployments.

Needless to say, a naval conflict with China in the Indian Ocean would be an ‘acid test’ for India—one that would require considerable planning and effort to prevail over the adversary.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is ‘not in a good mood’, US President Donald Trump recently declared, as he offered to mediate India’s resurgent border conflict with China. After years of bending over backwards to appease China, Modi has received yet another Chinese encroachment on Indian territory. Will this be enough to persuade him to change his approach?

While India was preoccupied with the Covid-19 crisis, China was apparently planning its next attempt to change the region’s territorial status quo by force. The swift and well-coordinated incursions by People’s Liberation Army troops into the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region in May were likely the product of months of preparation. The PLA has now established heavily fortified camps in the areas it infiltrated, in addition to deploying weapons on its side of the Line of Actual Control, within striking distance of Indian deployments.

China’s ‘unexpected’ manoeuvre shouldn’t have been unexpected at all. Last August, China’s government vigorously condemned India’s establishment of Ladakh—including the Chinese-held Aksai Chin Plateau—as a new federal territory. (China seized Aksai Chin in the 1950s, after gobbling up Tibet, which had previously served as a buffer with India.) And the PLA had been conducting regular combat exercises near the Indian border this year.

Deception, concealment and surprise often accompany China’s use of force, and Chinese leaders have repeatedly claimed that military pre-emption was a defensive measure. Its latest assault on India—which China claims is the actual aggressor—was taken straight from this playbook.

Yet Modi didn’t see the Chinese incursions coming. His vision seems to have been clouded by the naive hope that, by appeasing China, he could reset the bilateral relationship and weaken China’s ties with Pakistan, another revisionist state that lays claims to sizeable swaths of Indian territory.

The China–Pakistan axis has long generated high security costs for India and raised the spectre of a two-front war. That’s why some Indian leaders have pursued a ‘defensive wedge strategy’, in which the status quo power seeks to drive a wedge between two allied revisionist states, so that it can focus its capabilities on the more threatening challenger.

In 1999, the first prime minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sought to win over Pakistan by visiting the country on the inaugural trip of a new bus service from Delhi to Lahore. Vajpayee was rewarded for his ‘bus diplomacy’ with a stealth invasion by Pakistan’s powerful military of the Indian border zone of Kargil. This triggered a localised war, in which both sides lost several hundred soldiers before the status quo ante was restored.

Unlike Vajpayee, Modi has focused his attention on China—with similarly disastrous results. In fact, soon after becoming prime minister in 2014—and just hours before hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit meeting—he learned that PLA troops had elbowed their way into southern Ladakh’s Chumar area, which lies along the Line of Actual Control, and built a temporary road there.

The summit was portrayed as a success, even though the Chinese didn’t withdraw until weeks later, after India agreed to demolish local defensive fortifications. This was the beginning of a policy not of reconciliation but of appeasement, the costs of which continue to mount.

On a trip to Beijing the next year, Modi surprised his own administration by announcing a decision to issue electronic tourist visas to Chinese nationals upon their arrival in India. He also delisted China as a ‘country of concern’, in an effort to court Chinese investment. Instead, the move opened India up to even more dumping by Chinese firms. On Modi’s watch, China has more than doubled its trade surplus with India to US$60 billion per year—nearly equal to India’s annual defence spending.

Meanwhile, the PLA has continued to encroach on disputed territories. In mid-2017, Indian troops were pushed into another standoff with the PLA—this time at Doklam, a small and desolate Himalayan plateau where Chinese-ruled Tibet meets the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim and the Kingdom of Bhutan. Indian troops stood up to the Chinese, as the PLA attempted to build a road to the India border through the uninhabited plateau that Bhutan, an Indian ally, regards as its own territory. The standoff lasted 73 days, before China and India agreed to disengage.

India declared the Doklam disengagement a tactical victory. But over the next several months, China steadily expanded its troop deployments by building permanent military structures, thereby gaining control of much of Doklam. Despite being the de facto guarantor of Bhutan’s security, India failed to defend the tiny country’s territorial sovereignty.

Yet Modi maintained India’s appeasement policy. In 2018, his government backed away from official contact with the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s India-based government-in-exile. At the same time, as Xi later revealed, Modi proposed an annual ‘informal’ bilateral summit—a proposal Xi gladly accepted, because high-level meetings aid China’s ‘engagement with containment’ strategy towards India. Two such summits have now been held, as well as 14 other meetings between the two leaders.

And what has Modi gotten for his troubles? China has stepped up its territorial revisionism, while raking in growing profits from the bilateral economic relationship (though, to be sure, India did recently tighten its policy on foreign direct investment, so that any flows from China must be preapproved).

Modi has himself to blame for this state of affairs. With his excessive personalisation of policy and stubborn strategic naivety, he has shown himself not as the diplomatically deft strongman he purports to be, but as a kind of Indian Neville Chamberlain. Unless he learns from his mistakes and changes his policy towards China, India’s people—and territorial sovereignty—will pay the price.

Many local factors have contributed to the face-off between Indian and Chinese forces in Ladakh.

Western Ladakh borders Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan, where China has invested hugely its economic corridor project with Pakistan under the Belt and Road Initiative. China’s apprehension about Indian designs on the territory has been accentuated by recent comments by Indian leaders, including External Affairs Minister Jaishankar, that India expects to have ‘physical jurisdiction’ over it ‘one day’.

Ladakh also borders Tibet and Xinjiang, the turbulent peripheries of China, and Beijing is apprehensive of Indian moves supported by the US that may threaten its control over these regions.

The trigger for the current face-off was China’s opposition to India’s laying a key road in the finger area around Pangong Lake and constructing another connecting Darbuk–Shayok–Daulat Beg Oldie road in Galwan Valley. China is also laying a road in the finger area, which India finds objectionable. According to Indian sources, China has deployed 5,000 heavily armed additional troops to the area and India has responded in kind. Both militaries have also moved in heavy equipment and weaponry, including artillery and combat vehicles, to their rear bases close to the disputed areas in eastern Ladakh.

Indian and Chinese forces in Ladakh are separated on the basis of a Line of Actual Control, drawn at the end of the 1962 war but still contested in some areas. India argues that Chinese forces have violated this arrangement. Bilateral moves at the military and diplomatic levels are on to defuse the situation, but both sides have rejected US President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate the dispute.

However, most observers believe that not only local factors have led to China’s move in Ladakh. Beijing is feeling increasingly beleaguered globally and regionally and has embarked on a strategy with several goals. It assumes that foreign adventurism cloaked in the garb of ultranationalism can shore up the Chinese Communist Party’s rule at home. While the authoritarian regime’s legitimacy rests primarily on its economic performance, it is now facing the prospect of a severe decline in the country’s GDP.

Simultaneously, creating a crisis with neighbours can divert international opprobrium at a time  when China is facing heavy criticism, including from Australia, because of its failure to notify the world of the coronavirus during the crucial early weeks when it could have been more easily contained.

In the face of such criticism, the Chinese regime is increasingly using jingoistic jargon to build up domestic support. In a recent speech, President Xi Jinping exhorted the armed forces to ‘prepare for war’ in order to ‘resolutely safeguard national sovereignty’ and ‘the overall strategic stability of the country’.

China’s relations with the US have been going downhill since soon after Trump was elected, which has unnerved Chinese leaders despite their disclaimers. Trade disputes have led to repeated threats by Trump that he would unleash a trade war against China. Beijing has deliberately eroded Hong Kong’s special status and is suppressing its pro-democracy movement, leading to much criticism from the US administration and in Congress. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told Congress that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China and no longer merits special treatment under US law.

Differences over Taiwan have added to US–China tensions. The CCP sees Taiwan as a breakaway province and it considers the US to be the primary impediment to the island’s integration with China. The Trump administration has significantly increased American support to Taiwan with arms sales and laws, such as the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act to help Taiwan deal with pressure from China. In response, China has stepped up its military activity around Taiwan, further accentuating the tensions.

Above all, US–China rivalry in the South China Sea appears to be the most serious potential flash point that could start a conflagration. Over the past decade, China has vigorously advanced its territorial claims there by militarising islands it controls and vociferously contesting claims by other states and impeding their attempts to access territories that they claim.

So far China has acted cautiously to prevent these moves from triggering a serious confrontation with the US, but that might change if it feels under greater pressure internationally.

Washington has a strong interest in preventing Beijing from asserting control over the South China Sea, as maintaining free and open access to this waterway is important to the US for economic reasons. It also has defence treaty obligations to the Philippines, which has been in the forefront of contesting Chinese claims. For China, the ability to control the South China Sea would be a major step in threatening the US position as the foremost power in the Indo-Pacific region.

Increased Chinese adventurism born out of its inability to respond adequately to external criticism and to control domestic discontent could result in an escalation of US–China tensions in the South China Sea.

If that happens, the India–China confrontation over road building and movement of troops close to the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh could become a sideshow in a much larger ‘great game’ played out in Asia between the US and China.