Biden’s meeting with “the Quad”, an anti-China alliance, explained

When President Joe Biden meets virtually with the leaders of Japan, India and Australia on Friday, he will be doing much more than attending a routine meeting of nations. It will show the growing importance of an informal alliance between these four countries to combat China, known as “the Quad”.

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an idea formed after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, has never had its heads of government meet before. And despite 14 years of trying to make it an effective forum for coordinating policies in the Indo-Pacific, it has rarely had much effect.

But Friday’s session will change that.

Government officials said the Quad will announce an “historic” and “unprecedented” financing agreement to produce 1 billion vaccines for India, the second most populous country in the world, by 2022. Nikkei of Asia on Wednesday noted that the group plans to build a supply chain of rare earth minerals that could erode China’s dominance in the manufacture of products like smartphones and batteries for electric vehicles. And several sources say that the four nations will, for the first time, issue a joint statement on their common vision for regional cooperation.

The presidential-level meeting and these changes, then, “is a statement that the Quad is here to stay,” said Tanvi Madan, an expert in the Brookings Institution group.

But the group’s recent prominence is not without controversy. Beijing sees it (understandably) as expressly destined to thwart China’s economic and military objectives.

While most experts also see it that way, no member state – including the United States – will openly say that concerns about China enliven the Quad. Instead, they argue that it exists for democratic nations with similar ideas to improve the lives of millions of people in the region and maintain the geopolitical status quo.

State Department spokesman Ned Price, for example, told reporters this week that the group is dealing with “urgent challenges” but not “about a single competitor”.

What happens on Friday, therefore, will impact the future of US involvement in Indo-Pacific and US-China relations. The expectation is for Biden and his counterparts to solidify the Quad’s place in these futures.

“For the United States, it is a great acceptance,” said Sheila Smith, a senior research fellow in Japan at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. “This is a very significant statement of the American intention to build with these countries a framework for the future of the region.”

What is the Quad?

Quad was born out of tragedy and necessity.

In December 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia, unleashing the deadliest tsunami in history. About 230,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami in a matter of hours. Its effects were felt mainly in Indonesia, but also in distant places like East Africa. The event caused damage estimated at $ 10 billion worldwide, making it one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of all time.

“Basic infrastructure such as shelter, medical capacity, transport routes, emergency services, energy, communication and sanitation have been lost,” noted the International Maritime Security Center in 2016.

Armed forces from the United States, India, Japan and Australia contributed to help with the response and even worked together in what became known as the Central Tsunami Group. This coordination cell was effective and proved the concept of quadrilateral cooperation. But after all the ships and helicopters returned to their bases, there was no real follow-up to transform the four-way partnership into something more lasting.

Jordon R. Beesley / US Navy via Getty Images

Then, in 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was talking to advisers about how to turn his most aggressive views on foreign policy into real politics. One way to do that, CFR’s Smith told me, was “to put value diplomacy at the center of [Japan’s] thinking about working with partners in the region ”. In addition, it would be good if strong democracies came together to keep the Indo-Pacific free and open to trade, among other things.

The Japanese government recalled the success of the four-nation tsunami team and saw this as a potential model for such a group.

A wave of discussions led to some progress in 2007, when the nascent Quad held a military exercise and a round of dialogue. But after China harshly criticized the group’s formation, Australia (and also India, some say) repented and withdrew from the selection of four countries to maintain good relations with China.

Abe’s Quad dreams were shattered and remained so for 10 years.

“You have to remember that this was a different period in the way these countries thought about relations with China,” Smith told me, noting that they hoped to involve Beijing and thus encourage it to become a more responsible actor on the world stage. . “Advance a decade, now we have a very different thought about Chinese power.”

Confrontation, not cooperation, with China has become the preferred approach in Washington, initiated in part in the past four years by former President Donald Trump.

In November 2017, the Trump administration revived the Quad idea with its foreign colleagues. The four nations said they would work together to patrol the regional waterways where China is acting aggressively, as in the South China Sea. This led some commentators and Chinese officials to speculate that they were witnessing the embryonic stages of an “Asian NATO”, a reference to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which started as a military alliance to fight the Soviet Union in Europe.

Quad members ended any such conversation, issuing public statements that never cited China’s rise to Quad’s return. “The discussions focused on cooperation based on their converging vision and values ​​for the promotion of peace, stability and prosperity in an increasingly interconnected region that they share with each other and with other partners”, a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the India deals in The Hour.

But experts are almost unanimous in saying the Quad is back on track because President Xi Jinping has turned China into an openly antagonistic power. Among other things, he solidified control over supply chains in key sectors and harassed neighbors at sea for territorial and energy gains.

China has also been involved in a deadly struggle over a border dispute with India, started a trade war with Australia, invaded the United States government and, for years, used its power to pressure Japan on economic and military issues.

The exciting idea behind the Quad, then, is that all four nations have a better chance of containing China’s aggression together than separately. How exactly to confront Beijing, however, was the group’s long-unanswered question. “Quadrilateral cooperation has always been a beautiful opportunity in pursuit of a genuine agenda,” said Eric Sayers, an expert on US-China relations at the American Enterprise Institute.

Group officials have met at least seven times since 2017, but always below the presidential or prime minister level, to discuss issues ranging from China’s commercial practices to its growing military power. And last November, warships and warplanes from the four nations came together for Malabar’s military training exercise in the Indian Ocean, the biggest demonstration of strength by Quad members to date.

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But despite several meetings and statements in support of Quad, it was really doing little more than maritime training and expressing the need for broad cooperation, experts said. The best that some could say was that the group brought nations closer together and made the idea of ​​a four-way structure in the Indo-Pacific more palatable.

The Quad, then, was a great place for nations to interact, but mostly without teeth.

Toothless, that is, until now.

Friday’s Quad meeting is a major launch for the group

A common thread in Biden’s foreign policy is the belief that solving big problems requires the United States to work with allies and partners. Confronting China is one of those challenges, and Quad serves as a ready way to do just that.

The new government is not “looking at Quad allies just for appearances,” said Sameer Lalwani, program director for South Asia at the Stimson Center. “This is a true division of charges” between “the largest countries, largest economies, maritime powers with real naval capabilities and democracies”.

The two results expected from Friday’s meeting are examples of this. India’s population of over a billion needs help to manufacture and distribute coronavirus vaccines. Instead of turning to China for this, the Quad’s other three nations are prepared to offer financial assistance.

“Something like the vaccine initiative will be Quad’s most prominent tangible outcome in some ways,” said Madan of Brookings. It also has the “added benefit of telling the region that it’s not just about China”.

“It’s a proof of concept for Quad,” she added.

China also produces about 60% of the world’s rare earth minerals, which has prompted both Republicans and Democrats to ask the United States to challenge Beijing on that front. If China continues to extract and refine most of the world’s rare earths, it will have a greater say in the future of telecommunications, green technology and other important industries of the future that depend on these elements.

Part of Biden’s platform is to modernize the United States’ economy to compete with China in these sectors, which requires loosening control of Beijing in the rare earth supply chain. It is a big challenge, but made easier with big countries like India, Japan and Australia willing to help, experts say.

In addition to the potential movement on climate-related issues, the four nations are also expected to issue a joint statement, the first of its kind for the Quad. Lalwani de Stimson said that such a united effort, albeit pro forma, would show that Quad is now seen as an important multilateral group, not just a side project.

“The Quad’s trajectory is clearly upward,” he said.

Xinhua / Zhang Yuwei via Getty Images

This portends potential problems with China, and Beijing has already expressed its discontent with the group’s rise.

Last October, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said: “What [the Quad] the aim is to flaunt the Cold War mentality and encourage confrontation between different groups and blocs and stimulate geopolitical competition ”. It is a more heated rhetoric than he used in 2018, when he called the Quad concept “sea foam” because it would soon dissipate.

But the Biden government has not been intimidated and has emphatically stated that the Quad is a central part of its plans. The group is “fundamental, a foundation on which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific region,” said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan during an event in January at the US Institute of Peace.

That is the right perspective, most experts have told me. “If China were behaving well, you would not see these countries engaging in these things,” said Madan.

After Friday’s meeting, then, the Quad is likely to have officially shifted from a marginal idea to a centerpiece of four-nation projects for the region, which could bring China to its heel.

“The goal here is basically to present the Quad as a new feature of regular Indo-Pacific diplomacy,” a senior government official told Reuters this week.