Quad as ineffectual bloc

In strategic security, diplomatic and political circles of many countries around the world, establishing Quadrilaterals — or Quads — appears to be the latest trend. Comprising four nations, as this newly emergent classification denotes, these existing and putative Quads are broadly confederations of ostensibly ‘like-minded’ states, grouped amorphously together against common security challenges threatening its members.

AUKUS only reinforces yet another Anglo-American accord in which non-Whites, including Indians, are excluded.

Consecutively, some of these Quads are also projected at securing common but nebulously defined economic or humanitarian goals, like swiftly disseminating Covid-19 vaccines, or in some cases, securing both objectives. But in reality, their aims remain high on rhetoric but low on substance, striving hard to tangibly amplify their tenuous strategic and operational goals.

In short, these Quads are more about grandstanding and hype, but abysmally low on delivery, especially with regard to achieving even prosaic military objectives.

The oldest and best known amongst these Quads — officially known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue — was founded in 2007 with Australia, India, Japan and the US as members with the inchoate aim of maintaining international rules and values in the Indo-Pacific region. It originated following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, providing disaster relief to numerous littoral states that collectively registered over 227,000 fatalities. Having operated seamlessly during the disaster, this grouping of maritime democracies opted thereafter to band together, ostensibly to contain China’s maritime hegemonic ambitions in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region or IOR. The Quad’s emergence followed joint naval exercises the same year in the Bay of Bengal in which Singapore also participated.

Beijing responded aggressively. Its strong protestations to India resulted in it being summarily disbanded but a decade later, in response to growing People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLANs) belligerence and rising force levels concurrently in the IOR and the South China Sea, the Quad diffidently revived itself. And with late-comer Australia that had, under Chinese pressure abruptly withdrawn from the consortium in 2008, the Quad conducted the joint ‘Malabar’ exercises in November 2020 in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.

Indian security officials, then ensnared by the ongoing military face-off with China’s PLA in eastern Ladakh over their mutually disputed border, looked upon this multilateral alliance of maritime democracies as a possible overt tactic to scare Beijing off, but to no avail. They perhaps believed that collectively, the Quad could spook Beijing by signalling the possibility of it ‘throttling’ the funnel-shaped Malacca Strait, through which over 80% of China’s oil and hydrocarbon imports from West Asia transit. By blockading the Strait, in what is termed China’s Malacca Dilemma, India and other Quad members estimated they could thus contain Beijing’s hegemonic ambitions by inhibiting its Belt and Road Initiative and the Maritime Silk Road enterprise to economically and strategically dominate Asia, and later other parts of the world to fulfil its medieval ‘Middle Kingdom’ aspirations.

Indian strategists also believed that other regional navies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam too could support the Quad in containing an expansionist Beijing, by impeding China’s Malacca lifeline. Most of these countries had unresolved maritime, trade or territorial disputes with China and good defence, security and diplomatic relations with India.

But this ambitious hypothesis ignores one fundamental reality: that all such motivations could come a cropper over the certitude of how many of these navies — including that of the US — would be willing to militarily thwart China at India’s behest to alleviate its faceoff in Ladakh? Besides, it also ignored the reality of the US being unable to deter or prevent China from illegally seizing and militarily fortifying forcibly seized and newly constructed islands in the South China Sea in open defiance of UN decrees with surface-to-air missiles and combat aircraft.

Moreover, there is an inherent dichotomy in all such calculations.

All Quad members, especially India and the US, had repeatedly reiterated that their coalition was by no means a security grouping. In July 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for instance, had categorically but feebly declared that the Quad was not a military union but an ‘arrangement to spearhead regional co-operation and security, while maintaining international rules and values’. And more recently, India’s Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla had defined the Quad somewhat indistinctly as a ‘plurilateral grouping of countries with a shared vision of their attributes and values’.

In late 2020, however, India pressed on further with the voguish Quad concept and alongside Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US announced the establishment of yet another four-member formation for enhanced economic cooperation. Subsequently, in July 2021, the US State Department agreed in principle to constitute an additional Quadrilateral diplomatic platform involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan to enhance regional connectivity.

On the other side of the divide, an adversarial and highly potent China-led Quad is in the making with Russia, Iran and Pakistan as members, and with Turkey as a possible fifth constituent to principally counter the previously listed groupings. Notably, three of its incipient members — China, Russia and Pakistan — are nuclear-weapon states.

Meanwhile, looming portentously in the background is AUKUS, the relatively more robust trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK and the US announced in September 2021 for the Indo-Pacific region that directly challenges China. Under AUKUS, variously dubbed in security and diplomatic circles as an ‘Anglophonic’ federation or a ‘Whites only club’, the US and the UK will help augment Australia’s long-range offensive military potential by providing it nuclear-powered submarines and upgrading its cyber and artificial intelligence capabilities to counter the PLAN’s burgeoning presence in the area. This militarily meaningful pact will further supplement Canberra’s 80-year-old ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing alliance that includes Canada, New Zealand and the US, only reinforcing yet another Anglo-American accord in which non-Whites, including Indians, are excluded.