Tag Archive for: Quad

New perspectives for the revived Quad

In late 2017, the revival of an idea over a decade old—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—created a wave of debate, concern and anticipation across the world. The Quad, as it is commonly referred to—or, more precisely, Quad 2.0, as this is its second life—is an informal dialogue between four of the world’s major democracies: the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Quad 2.0, like Quad 1.0, is a controversial yet important idea that has survived the test of time. The four members’ first major get-together was in December 2004, when they responded to the massive Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in a coordinated multilateral humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operation. Following that, in 2007, the first informal meeting between the four happened on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum in Manila. Soon afterwards, the first naval exercise involving all the Quad members drew Chinese diplomatic protests, after which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pulled Australia out of the exercise. Quad 1.0 fell into lethargy.

It’s controversial because it’s perceived to be a way of containing China, which makes it unpopular among many of those who believe that China can’t be contained. Other critics say that it’s an improbable platform for cooperation, especially in the area of defence, among such a diverse group. Concerns (and misconceptions) have also arisen among regional actors, particularly ASEAN, which is said to see the Quad as a way of bypassing its own centrality.

After a decade, the strategic environment has become more tense, and concerns about China’s actions and position in the region, as well as globally, continue to deepen, justifying the revival of the concept. It was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s concept of a ‘democratic security diamond’, unveiled in December 2012, that first brought the Quad back to life. And in November 2017, Japanese Defence Minister Taro Kano gave an interview that again focused attention on the Quad idea.

Perhaps Quad 2.0 has received substantially more attention than is warranted by its meagre showing to date. Three meetings of officials (not even ministers) from the four governments have been held, without producing binding official joint statements. Yet, Quad 2.0 has become one of the most contested ideas in current geopolitics. Why?

To objectively answer that question, ASPI’s latest Strategic Insights report—Quad 2.0: New perspectives for the revived concept, comprising a selection of pieces from The Strategist—provides a diversity of perspectives on the relationship between the Quad and a range of countries’ national and regional interests. The contributors shed more light on the prospects for the development of Quad cooperation and explain how the individual nations involved in the Quad, as well as regional actors that are concerned about it, will respond to the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Unlike Quad 1.0, Quad 2.0 seems to have gained bipartisan support in Australia. The government’s 2017 foreign policy white paper confirmed Canberra’s strong commitment to trilateral dialogues with the US and Japan and, separately, with India and Japan: ‘Australia is open to working with our Indo-Pacific partners in other plurilateral arrangements.’

India has been said to be the most ambivalent of all. The Strategic Insights report includes nuanced and diverse views from Delhi about how Prime Minister Narenda Modi is likely to approach India’s participation in the Quad. India’s vital interests in the Indian Ocean and China’s activities in the area can make the Quad more compelling as a framework for strengthening Delhi’s security.

Official policy documents affirm the US’s full commitment to Quad 2.0 as one of Washington’s key security avenues. The Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, which President Donald Trump signed recently, reads in part:

(1) the security dialogue between the United States, Australia, India, and Japan is vital to address pressing security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region in order to promote—

(A) a rules-based order;

(B) respect for international law; and

(C) a free and open Indo-Pacific; and

(2) such a dialogue is intended to augment, rather than replace, current mechanisms.

This raises a question about whether the US government sees the Quad as part of the policy of confronting China, which has gained momentum after hardline national defence and national security papers, Trump’s tariff war, and Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the Hudson Institute calling out China as a strategic competitor.

Out of the many question marks that punctuate each Quad member’s national debate about the utility of the grouping, one thing is clear: their views remain barely coordinated.

This is apparent even to external observers. An original ASPI survey has shown that, despite the common view that ASEAN is suspicious about the Quad, ASEAN member states evince a wide range of dissimilar opinions and assessments of the value of security cooperation amid growing challenges. The disparate views among individual ASEAN member states, as well as the gap between political leaders and intellectuals in the region, reflect the complexity of the strategic environment today.

A key to the success of the Quad is its relationship with the Indo-Pacific concept. Quad 2.0 coincides with the promotion of the theme of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP), also articulated (although not without differences) by the four partners, which adds to the general confusion. Because the Quad shares some of the principles that are supported by the FOIP, the two are often conflated. But while the FOIP advocates openness and inclusivity, the Quad is a minilateral, which by definition has exclusive membership and a limited and sharply focused agenda.

In each case, more conceptualisation is needed: both the FOIP and the Quad continue to suffer from a lack of clarity, and as a result are gaining limited external support.

The fundamentals of the Quad

Since 2013, the Heritage Foundation, together with ASPI and think tanks in India (Vivikananda International Foundation) and Japan (first the Tokyo Foundation, and now the Japan Institute of International Affairs), has hosted a discussion called the ‘Quad-Plus Dialogue’. The 2019 iteration starts next week in Sydney.

The idea of a quadrilateral dialogue, of course, was not the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation or our partners. In fact, anyone familiar with it knows that it originated in Japan, during Shinzo Abe’s first stint as prime minister.

What Heritage and its partners did do was revive the idea and keep the conversation going until our governments signed back up. Throughout that effort, those of us from Heritage (I can’t speak for the other organisations) were guided by several key principles. Now that the Quad has been revived at an official level, it bears laying those out to help give shape to the way forward.

First, the forum would mostly be about China. We have never pretended otherwise. We weren’t insensitive to Chinese concerns with the concept of an official Quad. At some level, it’s understandable. No government wants to be the subject of a multinational discussion. Still, the impact of China’s rise to global power is something that must be acknowledged directly. Dissimulating would dilute focus in our home capitals, and not only not fool the Chinese but breed greater distrust.

Second, additional partners—what we called ‘plus’ countries—could provide critical perspective. At first blush, bringing other organisations or governments into Quad discussions may look like the expansion of an anti-China coalition. It’s true that including others allows us to explore for synergies in approaches to China, on maritime security, for example. More importantly, however, non-Quad countries serve as sounding boards. Their relationships with China will be affected by what the Quad does, as will their operating environments in the diplomatic, security, economic and other domains. They should be heard, not only because they deserve to be, but because they have valuable, unique insights.

Third, we recognised that all four Quad countries and the ‘plus’ partners have productive relationships with China—especially on the economic side of the ledger. Some of them have acute conflicting interests, such as over India’s land border and the China–Pakistan relationship, China’s claims in the East and South China seas, and the standing threat to Taiwan. But those conflicts aren’t the sum total of their relationships. Reflecting this reality, we never characterised the effort as anything resembling ‘containment’—which we calculated would be a perfect way to kill it, through irrelevance.

Fourth, coordination among the Quad countries shouldn’t be about economics. There’s sometimes a fine line between economics and security. Should the Quad coordinate on investment screening or technology development, for instance? Absolutely. But it can’t be about gaining market advantage vis-à-vis China. It should be strictly about minimising direct security risks. Neither is the Quad about shaping national economies, creating trading blocs or establishing exclusive supply chains. Such antidotes would only make worse the sicknesses caused by China’s market distortions.

Fifth, values matter. It’s no accident that the Quad countries are liberal democracies. Likewise, all of our ‘plus’ partners enjoy liberal political freedoms at home and support an interstate liberal order abroad. The former has mostly been implicit in our discussion. The way countries govern at home affects the way they interact with the world. Discussions of how to best craft the institutions of interstate order have been much more explicit.

Not everyone’s going to like this formulation of the Quad, especially those partial to the clean lines of global geopolitics. But the truth is that the political systems of the Quad countries, those of the ‘plus’ partners and China’s own are much too complex for that. Each country involved has conflicting internal interests, not to mention conflicting interests with one another. Of course, the Quad-plus countries share many interests, too, and not only those related to China. They come together for the express purpose of coordinating those overlapping interests.

The most important thing that unites the Quad countries, however, is an awareness that managing the rise of China is the defining challenge of our era. They know that getting it wrong will make the difference between war and peace, security and insecurity, prosperity and want, and freedom and oppression. This is what has brought our think tanks together for going on six years, and it should continue bringing our governments together long into the future.