#10: The Quad
Objective/purpose: soft containment of China as it increases in strength; an understanding (falling short of an alliance) between democratic nations in its orbit that the key to their prosperity is an Open & Free Indo-Pacific Region. Fears of a new Cold War, China sees it as an “Asian NATO” which they aren’t happy about
This week we’re taking a look at the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue made up by four nations in the Indo-Pacific: Australia, Japan, India, and the United States of America. This arrangement is otherwise known as the Quad.
So what is the Quad? Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, is credited with the creation of the Quad in 2007. His vision for the organisation was for it to grow beyond four members and to become an “Arc of Asian Democracy”, which would include nations from Central Asia, East Asia, and South-east Asia becoming members. It is not a formal defensive alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), it’s a looser arrangement which involves cooperation in military training & practice manoeuvring thus far without anything as high profile as a joint military operation. It’s mainly a framework for each of the parties to discuss their common challenge: the rise of China in the Asia-Pacific.
The Quad is a defensive structure, it doesn’t intend to present an aggressive front to China, but the purpose is to make sure that the rise of China doesn’t too heavily disrupt the strategic & economic interests of the Quad’s member nations. They don’t want China to be destitute, but they don’t want it to be unrestrained in remaking their common area to overwhelmingly benefit China & its partners.
I thought it would be helpful to break down the purpose of the Quad for each of the member states as I see them, so we’re moving more deeply into the “opinions” part of this piece.
JAPAN: A Hedgehog Fending off Foxes
North Korea is their biggest foreign threat, and North Korea relies on China for both political & economic support. The North Korean nuclear programme gives the Chinese headaches, but generally they are on friendly terms - North Korea is the only nation in the world to have a a defence treaty with China. China is a direct rival to Japan, as they occupy the same region & have a long history of aggression - Japanese military forces invaded China in the 1930s and have been accused of widespread war crimes. In the modern-day; if China feels strong & self-confident about their security in the East Asia region, then they may be of a mind to promote North Korean interests at the expense of Japanese interests in a more assertive way. A stronger North Korea with more leeway from its senior partner clearly runs contrary to Japanese interests. They see a partnership between their two nuclear-armed antagonists as an existential threat, and seek to build up their own partnerships to compensate. Japan has considerable resources in their own right, but due to treaties signed with the USA after the Second World War their ability to mobilise an expansive military & to acquire advanced weaponry is limited. They desire to establish partnerships around the world which makes outright North Korean aggression toward Japan unpalatable to Chinese high command. China doesn’t want to be distracted by North Korean policies, which means keeping North Korea on a tight lease, and the best way for the Japanese to keep that lease tight is by being too spiky to chew on. Japan adds spikes by adding allies which have a mutual interest in restricting Chinese ambitions to theory rather than action. So instead of the Chinese being relaxed toward the actions their ally take toward Japan, they are very motivated to keep the Sea of Japan clear of flying missiles to & fro.
AUSTRALIA: Banned Accounts & Bank Accounts, Human Rights & Mineral Rights
China is the #1 location for exports & imports in the Australian economy, accounting for 27% of two-way trade. The Australians recognise that many nations they have friendly & developing relationships with - Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, India, etc - have concerns about Chinese power in the Asia-Pacific region. They share these concerns, and so aim to maintain the American-led status quo in the Pacific region, and the Quad is a part of their straetegy toward achieving that goal. Australia isn’t alone in dreading conflict within the Pacific, not only for humanitarian reasons, but also for matters of trade. Australians like the status quo of being great mates with the Americans while selling the Chinese a lot of natural resources; it suits them & their interests. The longer the Sino-American rivalry stays in the realm of soft power and proxy wars fought far away from the Pacific, the longer the Australians can put off the nightmare situation of having their #1 ally and their #1 trading partner lock horns. By joining with the Quad and extending their partnership with the United States, Australia becomes another link in the chain fence restraining Chinese efforts. And sure, the Chinese could decide to punish the Australians for doing so, and occasionally they create a minor but meaningful disruption in trade so the Australians stay aware of just how fast that trade could cut off. But the trading relationship suits the Chinese as much as it does the Australians - they could get iron ore from Brazil or South Africa, but Australia is much closer and has way more of it. The same goes for newer minerals; China’s future needs for lithium could come from Chile or Argentina, but once again, Australia is closer & better at mining. So for now, the Chinese & Australians agree to disagree on political grounds but cooperate economically. Australia wants the Quad to act as a deterrent to China wanting to augment that arrangement.
INDIA: Shrinking Mountains, Changing Landscapes
Something you may not know is that China & India regularly skirmish with each other on the Kashmiri border (which is disputed). By mutual agreement they do not use bombs or bullets, but restrict themselves to fists and clubs and other handheld old-fashioned weapons. While modern-day soldiers on both sides have died from this 21st century melee combat, the nations’ militaries first began to engage in 1962 when some 2,000 Indian & Chinese soldiers lost their lives in a border dispute. The Indians may well look at China as their main rival, but it is China’s partner Pakistan which most concerns India. Both India & Pakistan possess nuclear weapons and have a bitter enmity - the potential conflagration keeps many scholars of international relations awake at night. India has many hundreds of millions of people more than Pakistan, it is wealthier and has a clearer path to being the dominant power of South & Central Asia - but because of the nuclear weapons over the border, they can by no means resign their enmity with Pakistan to a second-tier issue. As we covered earlier in the history of the blog, the most developed piece of China’s Belt & Road Initiative is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor - Pakistan is very important to China’s energy resilience. This makes India’s neighbourhood pretty tough: their oldest rival in China is now firmly aligned with their most volatile rival in Pakistan. India is the only non-American member of the Quad to not be an ally of the United States, and during the Cold War was a leading member of the Nonaligned Movement - they hedged their bets between the Soviets and the Americans. They have kept this approach; India still buys significant amounts of oil & gas as well as military equipment from Russia. But Russia has a more important partner in China, and Chinese interests may one day prevent the Indians & the Russians from continuing their successful trading relationship. Just as the Chinese fear their energy supplies from the Middle East being cut off at the Strait of Malacca, the Indians may fear their energy & military supplies from Russia being cut off & diverted to Pakistan. They have performed the same calculus which the Japanese & the Australians have done: a rising China could very well lead to emboldened rivals which an axe to grind. This has led to India moving closer to the Quad as they have started to reconsider where best to invest their efforts. For 5,000 years the societies & cultures of India & China have been kept apart by the impassable Himalayas, preventing these two civilisations from clashing. Now that the Himalayas have been shrunk by technology, two of the world’s great civilisations finally have occasion to size each other up.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Soaring High
The case for the Americans being involved in the Quad is simple: the proud Eagle cannot allow the ambitious Dragon to fly higher than it. The Americans want to keep the status quo in the East Pacific (and elsewhere) stable because it has been designed to suit them; the Chinese want to change it to suit themselves. The first Western historian Thucydides crystallised this idea best with the Spartans rising up to challenge the Athenian League in the Peloponnesian War: all rising powers challenge established powers for primacy. Since he described it, this phenomenon has been known as the Thucydides Trap and has been repeated all across the world through thousands of years of history. All rising powers challenge established powers, it happens all the way from the familial structure (teenagers challenging their parents’ authority) to the level of empires (the surging Roman Republic prodding the old Parthian empire). Chinese challenges to American authority is our modern day equivalent. Now, the Eagle can allow the Dragon to fly in the same sky as long as it doesn’t go past a certain height & gives the Eagle plenty of room. The Quad is a piece of the framework developed by the United States to restrict China’s ambitions and capabilities when it comes to influencing world affairs. Be careful not to see this as Cold War 2.0, for while there are similarities this conflict has different end goals. The two biggest differences that I can see are these: firstly, the Chinese don’t hold the view that every nation must embrace & replicate their style of governance - they don’t mind if, say, Argentina has a democratic process & laissez faire capitalism as long as they don’t interfere with Chinese interests; the second big difference is that the American & Chinese economies are fundamentally interdependent while the American & Soviet economies barely overlapped. American finance flows into China and Chinese goods flow into the USA - they need each other. So the ultimate goal for the Americans as I see it is to make sure that the Chinese economy is large enough for them to continue buying American goods and selling Chinese goods to Americans, while simultaneously ensuring that the foreign policy goals of the CCP are restrained to pursuits which don’t get in the way of American interests. Because the Americans have been so involved in the Pacific since 1945, the task is this: keeping the world’s second-largest economy from exerting influence within its own region.
CHINA: All Grown Up
What about China’s perspective? Well, a driving part of the Chinese foreign affairs philosophy is that in the recent past (1800s-1950-ish), they were humiliated by Western powers of the time, namely the British & the Japanese. They term this the “Century of Humiliation”, and like anyone who sees themselves as humiliated, they’re keen to correct it. The period when a quickly growing China concealed its strength & bided its time was swept aside when Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party & President of China, entered office in 2012/13. China is now enthusiastic about displaying their strength all across the globe in many different ways, the aforementioned Belt & Road Initiative being one major example. So let’s imagine ourselves in the Chinese high command’s shoes: you shook off the imperialistic yoke in the 1950s after a century of embarrassment, you outlasted the meddling & corrupt Soviet Union, you stopped the Americans from uniting Korea & Vietnam and in doing so prevented them having a direct entry point to the homeland, and you lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a matter of decades - there is much to feel accomplished about. There were certainly missteps, mainly the Cultural Revolution, the failed Great Leap Forward and the One Child policy, but those events are in the past (but their repercussions are not).
But now the imperialists are back in your area. Instead of it being the British, it is their heirs the Americans and their lackeys in Japan (who killed millions of your people only a century ago), Australia and India, along with other smaller powers found in East & South-East Asia. They feel threatened by your rise; a rise which is a return to the mean of human history with China’s magnificence clear to all. After a brief interlude in this magnificence, this new imperials power seeks to restrain our growth in influence & power to a tiny pocket of one ocean which in which you are unequivocally the biggest player. Beyond that, they are meddling in the strictly domestic issue of the reunification of China with the province of Taiwan.
When the Quad is viewed from the Chinese perspective, it can be seen as a collection of status quo states which are determined to make China wait their turn. This is why the Chinese are so sensitive to these obstacles - they are sensitive to recent wrongs paid them by others & in many respects insecure about their place in the world. They, like any expanding power, want to push against every door they can find and see which they can walk through. Some doors are more important than others, but every door is interesting.
Something important to keep in mind is that nation states are not some monolith which moves from one thing to the next in a mathematical way - they are nothing more or less than a collection of people, people who usually share a common language, characteristics, and history. Xi Jinping calls the shots in China, and while he might only get 80-90% of what he wants when it comes to how China positions itself in Africa or in how they wrap up domestic failures of property development companies, after more than a decade of consolidating power it is Xi’s way or the highway. China’s reaction to movements from the Quad will come straight from the top & be implemented downward - the barrier it presents is too big to be delegated.
So, where does the Quad lead? Does it become a Quint? Is the cooperation we see now to remain the standard, or will it grow? What do the Chinese do about it, can they find a wedge issue for these four states?
Thank you reading my breakdown of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as I see it. This one is more of an opinion piece than the usual package of facts, so I hope it kept you engaged.