Summitry seems suspended amid U.S. effort to ease tensions with China
When U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he ardently embraced the Quad initiative that had been revived by his predecessor, Donald Trump, elevating discussions in the four-nation grouping with Australia, India and Japan to the level of summits of national leaders instead of just meetings of foreign ministers.
Biden first brought his counterparts together in March 2021 online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House then hosted the first in-person Quad summit six months later.
Yet after a flurry of similar meetings, including an informal gathering in Hiroshima, Japan last May on the sidelines of a Group of Seven summit at which the four leaders committed to jointly “meet the challenges” facing the Indo-Pacific region, there is no tangible plan in place now for another summit.
Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti has suggested that the next summit will likely have to wait until after November’s presidential election.
This in effect probably rules out any fresh summit before early 2025 even as regional security challenges mount, with China applying increasing coercive pressure on Taiwan in the wake of the presidential election victory of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te and further tensions building along China’s frontiers with India and Bhutan, and with the Philippines in the South China Sea.
If that was not discouraging enough, it must be noted also that little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups established over the last three years, covering critical and emerging technologies, climate change, cybersecurity, infrastructure, space and COVID-19 vaccines.
To be sure, an overly ambitious agenda, as underscored by the working groups’ focus on diverse global issues, has constrained the Quad’s ability to produce tangible results.
The Quad, as a grouping of just four democracies, is in little position to manage universal challenges. Yet this is the course Biden has taken the Quad on, with the result that the group’s Indo-Pacific security objectives have sometimes taken a back seat to discussion of global challenges.
The Quad’s core agenda, as affirmed by the U.S. in 2019, is supposed to center on realizing members’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. This should mean effectively acting as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensuring a stable balance of power in a region that brings together the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
But Biden’s policy of engagement with China may explain why, despite a changing geostrategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, the Quad now lacks clear strategic direction and resolve.
With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wants is conflict or even greater tensions with China.
This likely explains his moves to ease Chinese concerns.
“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.”
The goal, he said, is “getting the relationship right” between the world’s two leading powers. Biden earlier assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that the U.S. would not seek to change China’s political system nor direct alliances against it.
After sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing for discussions, Biden made a promise to “responsibly manage the relationship” during talks with Xi in San Francisco on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.
The stepped-up effort to steady the fraught Sino-U.S. relationship thus may have contributed to U.S. soft-pedaling of the Quad. Indeed, the four Quad leaders pointedly did not convene when they were all together at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi last September as they did in Hiroshima four months before.
The question then is whether Biden’s policy of coexistence and cooperation with China is paying dividends.
It would not seem so. Xi, seeing America distracted with Europe and the Middle East, has upped the ante by stepping up coercion of Taiwan. There have also been more frequent Chinese provocations and maritime incidents in the South China Sea, including with U.S. aircraft and ships.
Xi may even see a window of opportunity for more dramatic action over Taiwan. At the same time, the new U.S. cold war with Russia has pushed Moscow closer to Beijing and turned China into its banker and most important trade partner, risking the creation of a pan-Eurasian axis that could further overstretch America and accelerate its relative decline.
While Xi is still willing to talk to the U.S., his actions suggest that, despite a slowing economy, he believes China, with a ramped-up nuclear arsenal, is in a position of strategic strength that it must leverage.
Against this backdrop, it would be a mistake to relegate the Quad to the periphery or turn it into a mere showpiece.
If anything, it is time to refocus the Quad’s attention on the strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, as it remains critical to the global balance of power and world peace. This means reaffirming the Quad’s strategic mission of preserving the present regional order. Without that, the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific could become illusory.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Stagecraft and Statecraft 