The Quad grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States is turning 20. And like a young person entering their third decade, the Quad’s time has come to start maturing into its proper potential and making its mark on the world, rather than trying to cling onto the safety and comfort of youth.
That means avoiding the major mistake that was made after the Quad’s creation in 2004 when, for fear of angering China, the four members, in particular Australia and India, began to back away. Worrying that the Quad risked creating provocation rather than delivering stability through regional balance, the member nations let it drift into a decade of stasis until it was revived in 2017 in response to collective concern over Beijing’s newly assertive and coercive stances. The first foreign ministers’ meeting in 2019, in the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, signalled that Quad 2.0 had arrived.
An opportunity to shape Quad 3.0 will come this week when, just ahead of this year’s UNGA, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets with his three fellow leaders in Delaware, United States. That meeting needs to produce outcomes that demonstrate that the four countries have learnt from the past and are prepared to give the minilateral group a renewed reassertion of relevance for regional stability and security to avoid its becoming just another yearly meeting.
Beijing would love to kill off the Quad a second time but, having calculated that the group is here to stay, its next best strategy is to hollow it out and make it a GINO—a grouping in name only. It’s to that end that Beijing is applying fresh pressure.
Downplaying the Quad’s security role, and thereby continuing a trend that has been creeping into Quad rhetoric for some time, would go a long way to delivering Beijing its aim. This pattern includes the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s explicit description of the Quad as a ‘diplomatic, not security, partnership’ and Japan’s then Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi—also a leading candidate to be the next prime minister—saying last year that the group was ‘not for security issues, nor military issues’.
What these mistaken messages of reassurance achieve is to help confirm China’s propaganda—consumed by ASEAN—that minilateralism, from NATO to the Quad, is the provocateur. True, the Quad is not a military alliance, but that doesn’t mean—and it can’t mean—that it doesn’t collaborate on security.
Language, moreover, must be backed up by specific plans. The announcement of this Quad meeting referenced a number of areas of security, including maritime security. But the group needs to go beyond such generic prose and explain what it means in practical terms.
Ultimately, this week’s joint statement must clarify the ‘practical co-operation’ previously promised by the Quad and provide a roadmap for the ways the four country-members can work together, including to build military capacity and to prevent aggression in the region.
Vigorous assertion of accountability for Beijing’s regular breaches of the rules and norms must also be part of the Quad’s agenda. These include bullying of neighbours in territorial disputes, cyber attacks and economic coercion, which are all too often left to the victims themselves to protest.
Such breaches should be called out by the Quad and not left to other groups like AUSMIN or the Australia-Japan 2+2 forum.
Accordingly, the Quad statement must expressly support the Philippines and condemn China’s illegal and aggressive behaviour in the South and East China Seas, not just express general support for the law of the sea or country-agnostic concern relating to unilateral actions.
China’s recent illegal incursions into Japan’s territorial airspace need to be referenced, flowing on from Australia’s bilateral support during the recent Foreign and Defence Ministers’ meeting with Japan. And while espionage is a universal practice, the protection of our smaller regional partners should be a priority. The recent cyber attack on the Pacific Islands Forum should be called out.
This clarity on the Quad’s agenda, role and principles is vital for its future. After all, there’s a reason minilaterals—from the Quad to AUKUS—are on the rise. Multilateral bodies should serve global interests by mustering a collective weight of countries that want the right thing for all—international common interests such as security, stability, sovereignty and solutions to global problems such as climate change. Instead, they are being co-opted and neutered by self-interested regimes including Beijing and Moscow.
The role of Quad leaders—particularly for both US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida who should aim to leave a legacy from their last Quad meeting—is to ensure such minilateral groups are effective until the multilateral system repairs itself—or regrettably in the event that it doesn’t.
As Quad leaders and foreign ministers head to UNGA after the meeting, they owe a message to the UN and multilateral bodies—do not fear China and Russia to the extent that lets them reshape international institutions to tolerate their own persistent breaches of international rules and norms.
After Quad 2.0 was launched, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously referred to the Quad as nothing more than ‘sea foam’, suggesting it would break up and dissipate—one half of its dubious narrative couplet that the Quad was an Asian NATO and hence provocative, yet at the same time ineffectual.
Recognising that total breakup is unlikely, Beijing is this time determined to render it a GINO. Sea foam, of course, can also be light, airy and insubstantial. As Quad leaders gather, they must seize the chance to reinject weight and substance, and give this minilateral grouping the power of a rising tide of co-operation towards a more secure and stable region.
