Quad Geopolitics

The Quad is back in the news after a long hiatus following its fourth leaders’ summit that was held over the weekend in Biden’s Delaware home. It used to figure prominently in discussions about the US’ plans to contain China until the unexpected announcement of AUKUS three years ago. That last-mentioned group thenceforth became the US’ preferred platform for containing China due to its explicit military focus, which significantly includes Anglo-American nuclear submarine cooperation with Australia.

The latest Quad leaders’ summit led to a detailed joint statement that’ll now be discussed before moving along to an analysis of this group’s newfound role in the New Cold War in light of AUKUS overshadowing it. The most important parts concern infrastructure and technology cooperation, which aim to bring together the associated capacities of “nearly two billion people and over one-third of global gross domestic product.” The unstated goal is clearly to counter China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI).

BRI became China’s vehicle for accelerating multipolarity over the past decade after it led to building a bunch of infrastructure projects across the Global South funded by low-interest loans. These served to expand the complex interdependencies that had formed between China and those countries. China requires more resources and markets in order to continue growing, while the Global South requires more infrastructure in order to unleash its vast potential, which is still far from being fully tapped.

The US was alarmed that China replaced it as those countries’ top economic partner, particularly because its modus operandi also partially replaces the role of the IMF and World Bank in the Global South. Unlike those two, China doesn’t mandate reforms from its borrowers, thus making it their preferred lender. The construction of physical infrastructure slowed down during COVID though so BRI since evolved into the digital, health, and other domains, where China remains the preferred partner.

This insight raises questions about whether the Quad can really compete with BRI since China is so far ahead of the US, Australia, India, and Japan in the Global South. They’ve thus resorted to presenting themselves as higher-quality infrastructure partners, but it’s unclear whether developing countries can afford the premium associated with their services, let alone that they even see the need to solicit them. It’ll therefore be an uphill challenge for them to claw back their lost influence in the Global South.

They’re more likely to succeed in pioneering new technological supply chains for semiconductors and the like. The trend of diversifying from hitherto Sino-centric supply chains began during COVID and remains a priority for the West and some of their closest non-Western partners like India, which has many bilateral problems with China and understandably doesn’t want to be dependent on it. The irony though is that China is Australia, India, and Japan’s top trade partner and the US’ top one outside of NAFTA.

In any case, these existing trade relations don’t mean that they can’t diversify from their dependence on China’s technological supply chains, which is of strategic importance for each of them. It’ll be a long process, but they’re committed to making progress on it. With time, they’ll presumably encourage other countries to procure their technological products from these new supply chains, but it’ll be a challenge justifying the higher costs compared to the much cheaper ones that China already provides.

The reader will notice that the analysis hasn’t talked about the Quad’s military capabilities, which is deliberate because there are very real limits to how far all four of them can cooperate in this sphere. The US has mutual defense agreements with Australia and Japan but not with India. The US’ Indo-Pacific mastermind Kurt Campbell acknowledged over the summer during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that “India] will never be a formal ally or partner in the United States”.

That’s because it remains committed to what’s known as “multi-alignment”, which refers to the strategy of cultivating equally close relations with the largest number of partners without any of these relations being at the expense of any other. It’s the natural evolution of its Old Cold War-era “non-alignment” policy. In the New Cold War, this has taken the form of India defying American demands to condemn and sanction Russia, let alone distance itself from it in the energy, military, nuclear, and strategic fields.

India won’t agree to anything that risks threatening its hard-earned strategic autonomy such as subordinating itself to America as that country’s junior partner for containing China. Military ties between those two continue to grow, and they’ve already signed logistics and research agreements, but India considers these to be fair and mutually beneficial. From its perspective, they bolster its deterrence capabilities vis-à-vis China, with whom it’s embroiled in a tense border dispute.

The same goes for joint and multilateral military exercises, including with the Quad countries, but it won’t go any further by committing itself to provide military support to anyone against China. This is a matter of principle of India and therefore greatly reduces the Quad’s ability to contain China. In fact, it might even have been one of the reasons why the US secretly assembled AUKUS in the first place, whose members are all tied to one another with security responsibilities.

Before contrasting AUKUS’ role in the New Cold War with the Quad’s, it’s important to say a few more words about Indo-US relations. They’ve recently become troubled over the past year after the US accused India of conspiring to assassinate a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist with dual American citizenship on US soil in summer 2023. The US then began ramping up its criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP ahead of last spring’s elections and even cooked up the Bangladeshi coup.

These three developments caught Indian policymakers off guard since they took for granted that their country was too important to the US’ global rivalry with China for it to risk worsening their ties through such unacceptable means. To make matters even worse, Modi’s latest trip to the US was preceded by the National Security Council meeting with Sikh separatists at the White House, which confirmed to India that it can’t trust the US even though it still wants to retain their existing mutually beneficial ties.

These factors contribute to the Quad relegating its role to that of an organization which mostly only cooperates on infrastructure and technology, notwithstanding its superficial security cooperation that occasionally makes headlines but lacks any real substance. AUKUS has replaced whatever role the Quad might have been thought to have in containing China. Its members explicitly focus on military cooperation, particularly on nuclear submarines, and have security responsibilities to one another.

AUKUS can therefore function as a proto-“Asian NATO” in the sense that it forms the nucleus of a regional coalition for containing China. There are already plans for formally including Japan, minus the nuclear cooperation element due to historical sensitivities, and the Philippines is a promising partner. Japan and the Philippines also signed a military logistics pact over the summer, and they’ve correspondingly been accused by Russia and China of provoking a regional arms race at the US’ behest.

Accordingly, AUKUS and what can be described as AUKUS+ or the proto-“Asian NATO” are much more important to American grand strategy than the Quad, the latter of which is now pretty much a yearly talking club with ambitious infrastructure and technology goals. India is the odd man in the Quad since it refuses to subordinate itself to the US unlike Australia and Japan, the last two of which are respectively a founding member of AUKUS and prospectively the first country to formally join that group.

American, Australian, and Japanese military cooperation will always be much closer than whatever either of those three Quad members have with India on the bilateral and multilateral levels. Australia and Japan have no compunctions about being the US’ junior partner, unlike India, which proudly defends its hard-earned strategic autonomy. So long as this remains the case, and there’s no reason to expect it not to, the Quad will never become an important geopolitical actor in the New Cold War.