There are multiple dimensions to Quad. However, here I would like to confine my focus on security strategy, which is at the core of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. QSD is the official name of what is known as the Quad. This is only to emphasize that at this stage all three words are important. It is a group of four – Australia, Japan, India, and the United States. It brings to the table security itself as a focus area. It does consider security in a broad sense to include several aspects of human security on a full humanitarian plane as well as more specific issues of mutual geopolitical interests.
The third word in QSD is dialogue. It is not an organization based on a treaty like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, neither it is something like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Still, It is called a dialogue, which is significant. It has some advantages as well as drawbacks.
The Quad does have a few things in common with multinational formulations like NATO, SCO, the ASEAN regional forum, G7 or G20. First, there is an agenda to pursue even if the agenda develops quite slowly.
There is a measure of like-mindedness between the members on a few key objectives. Perhaps, I would like to add a caveat here, there can be a few differences amongst all partners all the time. Some differences may be critical between the members. Some smaller differences can be ironed out, or some can become stronger with changing circumstances. For example, France in the late 1940s, an original member of the NATOs embryonic Western European Union, became a full and founding member of NATO but withdrew later from the military command structure for several years. It resulted in the shift of NATO headquarters from France to Belgium. In groupings now, like the G8 or the G7 Summit, which took place just a while back or the G20, there is also entry and exit of members. Some nations are, to use a modern term which the younger generation uses, ‘friended’ and sometimes ‘unfriended’ from such groupings. The Quad may consist of four members now. But there is every possibility and a great reason for the Quad to expand from the G4 to a few more, and a bit more on that soon.
Economic security, economic worries and economic opportunities, and even economic protectionism are quite important within most groupings, although not openly acknowledged at times.
No matter what may be the initial drivers or desire to form such grouping by whatever nomenclature, a military security element exists from the beginning or comes in eventually often in the form of a dialogue and that’s how the Quad began.
All these commonalities can be discerned in the Quad itself. The Quad emerged in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It was essentially the armed forces of the same nations that form Quad today. These four nations got together very quickly with Navies taking a lead service role because of the marine geographies of the affected countries, and the responding countries. This was the origin of the term Quad or as it was called the Core Group at that time.
Let me digress a little bit into a personal recounting. I had just been posted to Canberra in Australia as a Defence Advisor to the Indian High Commission a few weeks before the Tsunami struck the region. Briefs were coming from Headquarters, Integrated Defence Staff (IDS), which was fairly new at that time. It had the role of Out of Area Contingencies that were to coordinating Headquarters for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief operations.
Admiral Arun Prakash, the CNS, was also Chairman, Chief of Staff Committee, and he was instrumental in galvanizing some countries to offer help, even when there was no Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or anything of that sort existing at that time. Everybody rose to the occasion, responded and did tremendous work. India did the largest share of helping neighbouring countries while itself was also severely affected. The Tsunami in that sense defined the Indian Ocean region. The Tsunami linked four Indo-Pacific nations, their forces and resources together.
The tsunami was, in a way, quite literally a wave that rose off the coast of Indonesia because of the earthquake. Eventually, it defined the western extremities of the Indian Ocean by hitting the coasts of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Islands within the Indian Ocean region itself. The Tsunami defined the beginnings of the Indo-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Four nations with the help of nations that were affected, like Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Maldives, all played key roles in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. At a national level, each of the affected nations played central roles in their own HADR efforts despite the tragic devastation they had experienced.
The Indonesia Armed Forces, just to take an example, remained mobilized for weeks, not only helping their citizens, but providing local guidance, support, and every liaison assistance to Foreign Armed Forces who were helping them with supplies, rescue and relief work. In India, I sometimes feel that we are forgetting that along our coasts, the Tsunami has ravaged tens of thousands of lives and ravaged geography also. Our armed forces were critical to assist local administrations throughout the coastal regions, not to mention what we did to help neighbouring countries!
Significantly, China did not offer any immediate attendance to any country and stepped in only later. This was noticed by all countries that were affected, and all countries that were responding. This then was the birth of the Quad in Human Security; surprisingly or not surprisingly because of military elements as first responders. In most cases, the military instruments of all these four countries were in the lead.
Briefly, and only to recap, the first informal meeting with the name Quadrilateral Security Dialogue was in Manila in May 2007 on the sidelines of the ASEAN regional forum summit.
After that, it was in general limbo with both Australia and India being careful not to antagonize China. Even the USA, under the Obama Administration, was quite soft on China and ignored developing the quad at that time.
One can say that from 2007 till about 2014 or 2017 Quad almost died. It was revived towards the end of 2017 with careful wording and there was no mention of China as a reason for coming together. But things did change from 2017 to 2021 and the Quad now seems to be at the threshold of something more concrete.
Understandably, official communique after Quad meetings, including the recent Leadership Summit, there has been no direct mention of China as a concern. On its part, however, China seems to take every opportunity to run down the Quad as an ineffective, avoidable coalition or even a feeble attempt at an Asian NATO against China. So, the irony is that the Quad officially tries to convey it is not at all against China with only oblique references to the need for adherence to rules-based international order, freedom of the seas, freedom of navigation, the need to counter maritime problems and it barely hints that it could be about China.
China and now even Russia seem to say that a coalition like the Quad is against China, but it won’t amount to much As –
1. The idea that there could be a concert of a few democracies in the Indo-Pacific, Itself is now old and needs to gather very robust confidence in itself.
2. At least three of the four countries, becoming more openly conscious of some commonality in their longer-term concerns about China, with Australia somewhat hesitant in voicing these for quite some time.
3. A maritime naval leading edge to this group was more workable initially than other instruments.
The importance of China as a major trading partner for each government combined with the difficulties of political congruence within this concert was a dampener. However, the difficulties in finding any satisfactory balance between prosperity and security seem to have increased over the next decade not only for India, not only for three other Quad countries but for several other nations as well. ASEAN nations are feeling the heat from China’s arrogant and almost belligerent behaviour, especially in the maritime environment that affects them deeply. Concerns about China are now being increasingly raised by military scholars, analysts, government officials, and Ministers as well as heads of Governments within the Quad.
There are serious concerns about China not only for Quad members but also for some European Union and ASEAN members. It is becoming clearer that appeasing China has not worked. In fact, over the years China’s influence, power, interest and involvement in the larger Indo-Africa-Pacific region has grown in such ways as to create worries not only for the Quad but for several other countries in the region.
China creates more anxiety every passing month than assurance even within its Belt & Road members. It began with the Paracel Islands in 1974 against then South Vietnam and in fact rubbing the emerging victorious North Vietnam wrongly despite being friendly with later.
China’s shrewd moves in the South China Sea, the subsequent expansion of territorial claims based on its Nine-Dash Line now seems to be mutating like viruses into the so-called Four Sha that is Four Sands baseline tactic, which could perhaps even become a strategy for PRC.
Each member of the Quad undoubtedly has a significant economic interdependence with China. Consequently all four, but especially Australia, Japan and the U. S. have to handle the most serious contradictions of what we can say between security and prosperity, or to put it colloquially like the Navy’s do, between Fag and Trade.
On the other hand, while India may not be as linked to China for its prosperity, in terms of Chinese energy, commodity demand, manufacturing, investments and markets. It has serious continental and maritime concerns about security.
These are mainly in terms of China’s territorial claims across our borders but also in terms of its maritime power ‘places and bases’ in the Indian Ocean region. Unprecedented Chinese belligerence from May 2020 and subsequent violent clashes in mid-June 2020 at Galwan resulted in the death of 20 Indian soldiers and possibly many more Chinese.
Japan quite obviously has to contend with Chinese claims on the Senkaku Islands. In recent times, it also had to counter very regular Chinese provocations in the seas and airspace in and over the Senkaku. Besides, Japan would be most impacted and worried, if China ends up incorporating Taiwan within PRC.
Australia now has several economic worries and has had to take China to arbitration on economic sanctions and strong-arming across a range of political and diplomatic issues in this Australia-China relationship.
The Sino-American points of friction are principally akin to the Australian misgivings and stem from the degree of security that the United States ended up trading for its prosperity. Their issues are wide-ranging and complex of course. China is a clear challenger to the United States’s preeminence in the western Pacific and to the trust, its sweetie partners might have. China aims to be a peer military power in the midterm with likely and effective multi-continental sway.
China is on its way to becoming a global economic competitor. It may acquire more friends and is working hard to acquire those friends. Other American concerns are over the trade deficit, intellectual property and espionage. Economic ties with China that some expected would alleviate friction have added to it. Thus, while there are some common aspects of political-economic concern across Quad members, the deeper issue that concerns India or Japan may not worry one or both to the extent Delhi or Tokyo may hope.
Similarly, the positions that each has taken regarding BRI or on some Chinese investments defer and may continue to defer. Yet, to all this, I believe security concerns that begin to dominate and its Chinese characteristics are now clearer than they have ever been before due to the Wuhan virus, Wolf Warrior diplomacy and renewed belligerence with several neighbours.
Not surprisingly since 2017, the so-called Quad 2.0 seems to have gotten some new life and it needs to be made much more robust. The Quad rightly is progressing along several cooperative lines –
1. Recent discussions give the quad an economic role in terms of increased trade and greater economic cooperation. It is also considering setting up avenues for infrastructure build-up in the Indo-Africa-Pacific region via models that capitalize on the rules of law that Quad nations offer, better diplomacy, avoiding the charges of corruption that the Chinese face. Such initiative is also an alternative to avoid the Chinese debt trap.
2. Humanitarian measures, including fighting Covid, better information management and sharing of intelligence.
3. Quad has to think of a robust response to deter China across the Himalayas, in the South China Sea and the East China Sea against Japan, Taiwan, and some ASEAN nations, especially Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, and now of late, even serious violations against the territorial sovereignty and integrity of Malaysia. Let us not forget the threats being made about Taiwan ever so often.
The Quad would matter more than ever for regional security to counterbalancing China. Though the Quad has taken some steps. Perhaps much more needs to be done on the maritime front. Naval interoperability is becoming better through more frequent exercises involving all four Quad nations. Focused attention is needed in all other important dimensions of warfare, which include air, land, cyber and space in addition to the sea mentioned earlier. These five fingers as such are created separately, and depending on the context we use like fingers on a strategic keyboard. But the greatest benefit and impact from these five fingers is in closing into a tight fist of jointness. Jointness will create superior deterrence to better counterbalance China. It should not only be joined within India but also aiming for greater jointness with the other three quad partners. Such inivitives could create a necessary interest in other nations, notably some ASEAN members, to consider participating in a possible Quad expansion to what could be called QUAD+. This is what has happened to various groupings as discussed earlier. They expand slowly as their appeal, utility and perceived need by others grew. While some ASEAN nations may currently be very tentative about the idea. Their concerns about China are real, even as they openly take a pro-China stand. There are very important nations like Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam to name just three who are thinking differently.
Let us consider a very large country like Indonesia. It has a tremendous expense, right across the Indo-Pacific. It has a robust economy, stable government, rule of law, very professional armed forces, and friendly relations with several nations. Not all its interest coincides with the Quad. However, the potential for cooperation remains with large nations like Indonesia.
I would suggest therefore that these nations will watch how Quad evolves across all dimensions of security. They will be watching all four Quad nations. Let me, therefore, mention the critical quartets of Quad. There are four lines of progress that Quad can make. This is represented by the quartet of DIME – that is Diplomatic, Informational and intelligence, Military and Economic. The DIME construct is used to define, practice and evaluate statecraft. This is, in a sense, the cabinet committee of security headed by the Prime Minister with the four ministers in exactly the DIME sequence – that is the Foreign Minister for Diplomacy, Home Minister for Intelligence and Information, the Defense Minister for military, and the Finance Minister for the Economics.
Other than the DIME quadrilateral and Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) for Quad, we have to recognize that China is trying to acquire friends and influence in the region. In India, I think we need to realize that we as yet have no partner or friend anywhere close to what China and Pakistan are for each other. To add to this, China is drawing Iran as well as Russia closer into its strategic orbit, this could be a Quad of sorts from a Chinese perspective. Our relations with Russia are good and so are our relations with Iran. But also some sort of new stresses are developing, which need to be managed directly. The recent meetings in Dushanbe between Indian and Russian National Security Advisors is a good example of the efforts being made.
There are fundamental, long term stresses in the Russia-China relationship, but they are drawing closer due to mutual coincidence of some interest in many areas, especially due to the US-Russia friction and the growing Russian energy exports to China which is becoming a major revenue source for Russia itself.
India’s old relationship with Russia would be useful for amending the Russia-US friction and to help further improve Russia and Japanese relationship. Given these complexities, India’s push for the deepening of the Quad Security relationship will be not only good for India but for the other three Quad members and future partners as the Quad may expand. It may help peace through counterbalancing and I hope we do not feel embarrassed for much longer in saying so.
Finally, Quad is not and need not be an Asian NATO, all the rhetoric notwithstanding. Nato was born out of the Atlantic Charter in 1949, out of the consequences of the Second World War. Born in the circumstances of the cold war, NATO was a political alliance that solidified into a treaty. It is a political treaty alliance now looking for new meaning and roles with military partnerships that are a consequence of such a treaty alliance. As such the term, a military alliance between nations is incorrect if there is no treaty. Because without a treaty, you can have military partnerships, but an alliance is a political alliance between nations.
In the Quad, three members are bound by bilateral treaties are the USA and Japan and the USA and Australia, which are not militarily as categorical as NATO is. So, the Japan-United States and the Australia-United States are treaty allies. India on the other hand has good relationships with the other three Quad members. Certain strategic and military partnership agreements with all three, but is not yet, and unlikely to be allied with anyone. So, Quad is not a NATO and need not be one.
To conclude, a robust Quad with coinciding security interests, military interoperability across all five dimensions (land, sea, air, cyber and space) and the DIME (Diplomatic, Informational, Military and Economics) could be a good step for the Indo-Pacific and help us get more partners and ensure to keep the dragon in check.
(The above talk was delivered by Rear Admiral Sudarshan Y. Shrikhande in the webinar.)
