The pandemic has stoked Chinese aggression, but it has provided others with opportunities to cooperate in maritime security, cyber-security, data flows, quality infrastructure and healthcare.
It is an idea whose time has come, no power on earth can stop it and it has moved at breakneck speed. All three of India’s partners in the Quad had sanctioned us in 1998 after our nuclear tests, and are now our buddies. The old ways of thinking and old policies are changing and adapting to new power realities and dynamics. As Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s, the times they are a’changin. This applies in particular to the Indo-Pacific, currently the most active region in the global geopolitical landscape. China cannot fight on multiple fronts at the same time—even the biggest bully gets exhausted after a while.
No one trusts China. Even the Chinese people are losing trust in the Communist government, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.
Look at China’s relationships with each of the four Quad members. Australia led the demand for an independent international enquiry into the origins of the virus. Furious, China sharply curtailed its imports from Australia and its sorry diplomats competed with each other to hurl abuse. One called Australia the white trash of Asia, while another called it chewing gum stuck to the boot of China.
Anti-Japanese sentiment can be seen in the more than 200 anti-Japanese war films produced and displayed in mainland China each year.
In 2017, following the Doklam standoff, Chinese state media, so sensitive to xenophobic slurs, released a racist propaganda video. The English-language clip, accusing India of committing “sins”, featured a Chinese actor in a Sikh turban, speaking in a mock Indian accent.
Last year, the state-owned China Television network pronounced the virus the “Waterloo for America’s leadership,” as a British-accented announcer intoned: “The health emergency is signalling the end of the American century…Washington is tumbling to rock bottom over its coronavirus response.”
This is certainly not language intended to win friends and influence people.
China’s coronavirus propaganda effort has sought to obscure the origins of the virus, floating theories that the US Army might have brought the disease to Wuhan, or that perhaps it started in Italy.
The besetting sin of China’s foreign policy is intellectual sclerosis. It has seen how foreign allies invariably succumbed to American blandishments, and the Communist Party wants to use that as a template for economic domination and military coercion.
In a recent media interaction, two former Canadian ambassadors to China had this to say: “Our trust in China is gone… China is not our friend and we should stop treating it as though it is.”
China has itself up into knots. It is a dystopian state with an acute inability to tell the truth.
The term Indo-Pacific was first used almost 100 years ago by a German geopolitician. Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the term in his speech to Indian Parliament in August 2007, talking about the “confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans” as “the dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity”. It is also “symbiotically linked” with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—a grouping of regional like-minded democracies, comprising Australia, Japan, India, and the US.
In 2019, the US State Department published a document formalizing the concept of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific”, to be sustained among members of “the Quad”.
QUAD
With so much noise and action on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, it is useful to remember that the Quad arose from the 2004 tsunami, not from any actions by China. India’s rescue mission in the Indian Ocean was coordinated with three other nations involved in such operations—USA, Japan, and Australia. China did not take part, possibly because its naval strength was inadequate, but more likely because there was no money to be made.
The world saw India’s ability to put together an impressive fleet within days and assist its maritime neighbours like Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia—32 ships and 5,500 naval personnel, even as it carried out magnificent relief efforts at home.
Created by an act of God (tsunami), the Quad is being propelled by the wicked acts of a godless nation.
The first incarnation of the Quad cracked under pressure from China in 2007. Commerce trumped other considerations. But following China’s recent atrocious behavior, the Quad was reborn in 2017.
Military cooperation is growing, with stronger naval ties among Quad countries and regular interactions at the political, military, and official levels. India is the only Quad member that shares a land border with China and the only one that can effectively confront China on land and sea.
In 2018, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrogantly dismissed the then recently-revived Quad as a “headline-grabbing idea” that would “dissipate like sea foam”. But in October 2020, he complained that Washington was aiming to build an “Indo-Pacific Nato”. Chinese officials, who once sought to downplay the Quad as an overhyped idea, now describe it as part of a broader effort in the region to “contain” China. And they are dead right.
In December 2020, the former US President conferred the prestigious Legion of Merit awards on the Prime Ministers of the three other Quad countries. China choked.
The pre-Quad Summit statements prove that that the initial hesitancy and diffidence had given way to more concrete ideas. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the Quad would discuss a “free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region”. The White House announced that one of President Joe Biden’s earliest multilateral engagements “speaks of the importance we place on close cooperation with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific”.
Just before the 12 March 2021 summit, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga spoke with his Indian counterpart. “The two leaders shared the recognition that cooperation towards realizing a Free and Open Indo-Pacific is becoming increasingly important and (agreed) to steadily advance… Japan-Australia-India-US quadrilateral cooperation,” the Japanese foreign ministry said.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison opined that the Quad “will become a feature of the Indo-Pacific engagement…it will be four leaders, four countries working together for peace, prosperity and stability of the Indo-Pacific, which is good for everyone in the Indo-Pacific”.
Good for everyone except China, which claims the Indian and Pacific Oceans (and the rest of the planet) as its ancestral property.
In practice, the military side of Quad has been intensifying through bilateral agreements and joint military drills that have grown in size and complexity in recent years to address what the US calls a “variety of shared threats to maritime security in the Indo-Asia Pacific”. As one of my distinguished colleagues has written, the Quad has willy-nilly become the core of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision. It seems headed for a “tough security-oriented core with a softer and inclusive exoskeleton that prioritizes the developmental agenda”. Whether or not explicitly admitted, Quad’s strongest bond is the need to address China’s growing nonsense.
The US no longer wants to go it alone, as it is too expensive to be the sole Rambo of the world.
The pandemic has stoked Chinese aggression, but it has provided others with opportunities to cooperate in maritime security, cyber-security, data flows, quality infrastructure and healthcare. The Quad Plus format will cater to the region’s economic needs, including infrastructure, connectivity, and capacity-building. Without generous alternatives, many countries would continue to be drawn to China, as moths to a flame. Even China cannot fault the Quad agreement on working groups on health, free trade and climate sustainability, as it has repeatedly sworn by these principles.
The masterstroke has been to mandate India to deliver one billion doses of the vaccine by next year, with technological, financial and logistical support from the other three. China has egg all over its face. It has been boasting about offering soft loans to dozens of nations to buy its vaccine, but with quality and debt trap concerns, not many are buying.
China’s biggest weakness is its inability to build coalitions, This is where the US wins hands down.
Lee Kuan Yew once said that China would not surpass the US as a global power because the US can draw on the talents of the entire world and recombine them in diversity and creativity. That is not possible with China’s ethnic nationalism. China appears big on the map, but two-thirds of the country is mostly desert or arid land, so China wants more land. Her main population and production centres are along the eastern and south-eastern sea-boards, where the Quad can hit hard.
Both in Taiwan and in Hong Kong there are alternative models of governance to the CCP. PingPong knows this, so Hong Kong must be Communized.
The Covid-19 catastrophe has triggered a change in many areas and geopolitics is no exception.
As China encroached into Ladakh, a common front against China’s expansionist policies began to accelerate. China is also being countered economically. If the world needs China economically, the reverse is also true.
India’s statement places Quad in the larger context of connectivity, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, maritime safety and security, health security and counter terrorism, besides underlying the collective vision of maintaining a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific.
Australia has committed itself solidly to Quad, as has Japan, whose recent enabling agreements with Vietnam and Philippines for defence exports could lead to similar arrangements with Indonesia and Thailand. The US is clear about Quad’s anti-China orientation. It wants to formalize the Quad to build a “true security framework”. India should ignore Chinese sensitivities, as China ignores not only our sensitivities but hits at our core interests.
We see the dawn of a new arrangement, with the Quad (as India’s Prime Minister said) “a force for global good”.
Leaders spoke of democratic values, no coercion, resilience, strategic trust, sovereignty and independence. China does not understand any of these terms and is frightened.
A recent Global Times article (Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece—even the name reflects an intention) warns about possible “preemptive action” on the seas by the Indian Navy (recalling Pingpong’s exhortation to his troops to be ready for battle at a moment’s notice, since, presumably, they sleep and eat most of the time). Those people in Beijing seem to realise, while not admitting it, that they have bitten off more than they can chew. The Quad should make them choke on their gluttony.
Ambassador Dr Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau; and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil.