Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” But far from dissipating, the Quad is strengthening, largely in response to China’s muscular revisionism.

Brahma CHELLANEY
published by RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry)

At a time when there is a life-and-death conflict between two systems of governance — repressive and democratic — a loose strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific region’s four leading democracies, the Quad, is rapidly solidifying. Comprised of Australia, India, Japan and the United States, the Quad has received a lot of international attention, largely because of the promise it holds toward underpinning the power equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, the increasing use of the term “Indo-Pacific” — which refers to all countries bordering the Indian and Pacific oceans — rather than the traditional term “Asia-Pacific,” underscores the maritime dimension of today’s challenges. Asia’s oceans have increasingly become an arena of competition for resources and influence (Note 1). It now seems likely that future regional crises will be triggered and settled at sea.

As is apparent from the websites of the White House and the foreign ministries of its four member-states, the Quad’s official name is the Quad, not “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,” as some publications keep calling it on first reference. The Quad’s origins date back to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated large parts of Asia, killing hundreds of thousands across Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. The four countries joined hands to coordinate disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. The idea of formalizing a Quad emerged from that humanitarian initiative.

After lying dormant for nine years, the Quad was resurrected in November 2017 and began regular working-level meetings. It started gaining momentum after its consultations were elevated to the foreign-minister level in October 2020. Under U.S. President Joe Biden’s initiative, the Quad leaders convened for the first in-person summit at the White House in September 2021. In fact, just weeks after assuming office, Biden organized a virtual Quad summit that yielded the Quad leaders’ first joint statement, which articulated a clear-eyed vision (Note 2).

China has long viewed the Quad with suspicion, with its misgivings reinforced by the more recent formation of the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) alliance, which President Biden called “a historic step.” The plain fact is that China’s aggressive actions have driven India closer to America, compelled Japan to strengthen its security alliance with the U.S., and forced Australia to abandon hedging and openly align itself with Washington.

China sees the Quad as a threat to its expansionist ambitions (Note 3). But, publicly, China has been dismissive of the Quad. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” Far from dissipating like “sea foam,” the Quad is strengthening, with its four democracies forging closer bonds in response to China’s increasingly muscular actions, which extend from the East and South China Seas to the Himalayas. In fact, opposing China’s coercive expansionism is the Quad’s unifying theme.

The next logical step would be for these democracies to play a more concerted, coordinated role in advancing broader Indo-Pacific security. The idea, however, is not to create an Asian version of NATO, but rather to develop a close partnership founded on shared values and interests, including the rule of law, freedom of navigation, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, peaceful dispute resolution, free markets and free trade.

China represents a growing challenge to these principles. At a time when the world is still battling a deadly pandemic that originated in China, that country’s muscular revisionism has lent new momentum to the Quad’s evolution toward a concrete, institutionalized grouping. In fact, with India’s closer integration, the Quad is beginning to blossom. And the Quad seems poised to deepen its strategic collaboration.

The Australia-India-Japan-U.S. quartet has affirmed a shared commitment to underpin an Indo-Pacific region based on clear and transparent rules, with respect for international law. The Quad’s agenda is centered on building a stable balance of power and a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a concept authored in 2016 by then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. That concept was later embraced by U.S. policy, becoming the linchpin of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy under two successive administrations. The Quad’s focus, however, extends beyond China and the security realm.

In fact, the media focus on the Quad’s geostrategic aspects has obscured the important role that the group is playing to bring about geo-economic change. The grouping’s geo-economic priorities are apparent from several of its initiatives, including the following (Note 4):

• Build resilient supply chains. The Quad’s supply-chain initiative extends from the technology and public-health sectors to clean energy. With Beijing seeking to leverage its domination of international supply chains, many economies, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have learned hard lessons about China-dependent supply chains. There is a growing recognition of the imperative to diversify supply chains and make them more resilient to interference or manipulation by any state. Toward that end, the Quad, among other things, has sought to secure supply chains for vaccine production and clean energy, as well as identify vulnerabilities and strengthen supply-chain security for semiconductors and their vital components.
• Rally expertise, capacity and finance to expand regional infrastructure. The Quad is working to finance and build infrastructure projects in the Indo-Pacific that are properly planned and financially sustainable as a counter to China’s debt-trap diplomacy, which is driving its “Belt and Road Initiative” even as it increasingly ensnares vulnerable nations in sovereignty-eroding debt traps (Note 5). Since 2015, the Quad partners have provided over $48 billion to more than 30 regional states in official finance for infrastructure related to public health, rural development, water supply and sanitation, renewable power generation, telecommunications and road transportation. Meanwhile, the Quad Infrastructure Coordination Group has been established to help deliver transparent, high-standards infrastructure by coordinating technical assistance and capacity-building efforts, including with regional states.
• Help vaccinate the world against COVID-19. The Quad Vaccine Partnership, launched in March 2021, is aimed at fostering equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines in the Indo-Pacific and the wider world by expanding vaccine manufacturing capacity in the quartet and donating vaccines to developing nations. This initiative is piloted by the Quad Vaccine Experts Group, which coordinates the Quad’s collective response to the pandemic. As part of their plan to donate more than 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses, in addition to the doses they have already financed through COVAX, the Quad countries seek to leverage the vaccine-manufacturing heft of India, which supplies more than 60% of the world’s vaccines against various diseases. Japan, for example, will invest some $100 million in India’s healthcare sector to help boost the output of COVID-19 vaccines and treatment drugs.
• Foster an open, accessible and secure technology ecosystem. This goal extends from 5G diversification and deployment to bolstering critical-infrastructure resilience against cyber threats. The Quad partners have now extended their cooperation even to outer space, including building a partnership for exchanging satellite data to promote sustainable use of oceans and marine resources and thereby protect the Earth. Critical and Emerging Technologies Working Group has been established.
• Keep climate goals within reach through clean-energy innovation and deployment as well as adaptation, resilience and preparedness. A Quad shipping task force, for example, will seek to establish low-emission or zero-emission shipping corridors between the Quad member-countries, including by inviting Yokohama, Los Angeles, Sydney and Mumbai to form a green-shipping network. The Quad is also aiming at a clean-hydrogen partnership to strengthen and reduce costs across all elements of the clean-hydrogen value chain and to boost trade in clean hydrogen across the Indo-Pacific. Another objective of the Quad is improving critical climate information-sharing and disaster-resilient infrastructure.

These initiatives show that the Quad, although catalyzed into action by China’s aggressive actions and irascible behavior, has a broader agenda heavily focused on geo-economic issues. After the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump took the lead in reviving the dormant Quad and giving it strategic meaning, the Biden administration, in partnership with Japan, India and Australia, has sought to orient the Quad toward addressing the geo-economic challenges. Following the G-7 summit in Britain in June 2021, President Biden revealed at a news conference that, after he won the presidential election, a Chinese leader (whom he didn’t name) sought to dissuade him from embracing the Quad (Note 6).

Today, its four members perceive the Quad as providing important new architecture in the Indo-Pacific for advancing cooperation economically and strategically. The Quad, through its geo-economic initiatives, including generous vaccine donations, is also seeking to project soft power.

The fact is that the Quad is fostering greater cooperation between and among its member-states, as well as with outside nations. By seeking to leverage both public and private resources to achieve maximum impact, the Quad offers an alternative model to China’s state-directed lending for infrastructure projects, which has saddled a number of countries with onerous debts and increased their dependence on Beijing. Australia has unveiled a $1.4 billion infrastructure fund for the South Pacific, while Japan and India have agreed to develop a series of joint projects along what they have called the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor,” which links the two continents via sea routes.

More fundamentally, the Quad member-states have come a long way toward cementing a partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than reality. The new AUKUS alliance is likely to complement the Quad. For the U.S., the Quad is becoming the central dynamic of its Indo-Pacific policy, with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calling the Quad “a foundation upon which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific (Note 7).”

While recognizing the Quad’s utility, it is also important to understand its limitations. Unlike the U.S. and Australia, which are geographically distant from China, Japan and India face a direct China threat, which the Quad cannot mitigate. While India in response has embarked on a major defense buildup, Japan — already shaken out of its complacency by an expansionist China vying for regional hegemony — is likely in the coming years to rearm and become militarily more independent of the U.S., without jettisoning its security treaty with Washington (Note 8).

Still, it is imperative that the Quad gain greater economic and strategic heft so as to ensure power equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific. By cooperating in economic, technological and security realms and coordinating their responses, the Quad member-states can help put discreet checks on the unbridled exercise of Chinese power. If China’s growing threats against Taiwan lead to military action, then a grand international coalition, with the Quad at its core, could emerge.

Footnotes:

1. ^ The White House, United States Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific (Washington, DC: The White House, declassified on January 5, 2021); and U.S. Department of State, The Elements of the China Challenge (Washington, DC: Policy Planning Staff, Office of the Secretary of State, November 2020).
2. ^ The White House, “Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement: ‘The Spirit of the Quad,’” March 12, 2021, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/12/quad-leaders-joint-statement-the-spirit-of-the-quad/.
3. ^ Kevin Rudd, “Why the Quad Alarms China,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2021.
4. ^ The White House, “Fact Sheet: Quad Leaders’ Summit,” September 24, 2021; and the White House, “Joint Statement from Quad Leaders,” September 24, 2021.
5. ^ Anna Gelpern, Sebastian Horn, et al, How China Lends: A Rare Look into China’s Debt Contracts with Foreign Governments (Williamsburg, VA: AidData at William & Mary, the Center for Global Development, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 2021).
6. ^ The White House, “Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference,” June 13, 2021, at Cornwall, United Kingdom, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/13/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference-2/.
7. ^ Kyodo, AFP-Jiji Press, “U.S. national security adviser says ‘Quad’ key in Indo-Pacific,” The Japan Times, January 30, 2021.
8. ^ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Full text of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between Japan and the United States of America, signed on January 19, 1960, available at https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html.

China has long mixed sports and politics. From its boycott of the 1956 Olympics to its more recent bullying tactics against the N.B.A., England’s Premier League and others, Beijing has treated sports as politics by other means. Now its Winter Olympics face a diplomatic boycott.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

The approaching Beijing Winter Olympics – the most divisive games since the 1936 Berlin Olympics – face several challenges: Boycott calls in the West; a Muslim gulag with more than one million detainees in Xinjiang; the new omicron variant of COVID-19; and a silenced #MeToo accuser, Peng Shuai, who is China’s top tennis player. No wonder Beijing is lobbying U.S. businesses, warning that they cannot expect to make money in China if they stay silent. 

The calls for a coordinated boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics (labeled by critics the “Genocide Games”) raise the question of whether such action can help influence China’s behavior under a president whose record in power is increasingly drawing comparisons to the past century’s most brutal rulers.

Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to then-President Trump, last year equated Xi Jinping to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Some others have compared Xi to Adolf Hitler, even coining the nickname “Xitler.” Xi, for his part, has cultivated a Mao Zedong-style personality cult and embarked on completing the expansionist agenda that the communist China’s founder left unfinished.

Indeed, Xi has sought to model himself on Mao, the 20th century’s top butcher. Like Mao Zedong Thought, Xi Jinping Thought has been enshrined in China’s constitution and made the central doctrine guiding the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi, like Mao, is reverently referred to as renmin lingxiu, or “people’s leader.” 

China’s new Mao, while ideologically committed to classical Marxism-Leninism, is apparently seeking to build fascism with Chinese characteristics. 

Under Xi, China has emerged as a wrathful, expansionist power that pursues “wolf warrior” tactics and debt-trap diplomacy and flouts international law at will. Two successive U.S. administrations have described as genocide Xi’s Xinjiang gulag, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi period.

The international costs of Xi’s despotism are apparent from the devastating consequences of the China-originating pandemic. Two years on, the world still does not know whether COVID-19 began as a natural spillover from wildlife or was triggered by the accidental leak of a lab-enhanced virus in Wuhan. What is apparent, though, is that Xi’s regime lied about the initial spread of the disease, hid evidence of human-to-human transmission and silenced doctors who sought to warn about the emergence of a novel coronavirus. 

More ominously, a massive cover-up in China to obscure the genesis of the virus suggests the world may never know the truth. Beijing has refused to cooperate with international investigations, characterizing them as “origin-tracing terrorism,” and instead peddled conspiracy theories. 

Thanks to Xi’s scofflaw actions, China’s global image has been badly dented, forcing the country to increasingly rely on its coercive power. According to a global survey, unfavorable views of China are at or near historic highs in most advanced economies.

But instead of undertaking a course correction, Xi is doubling down on his renegade actions, as underscored by China’s stepped-up bullying of Taiwan. After Beijing’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayan borderlands with India, Nepal and Bhutan, risk is growing that Xi’s expansionism could make Taiwan its next target.

Beijing will have the honor of becoming the world’s first city to host both a summer and winter Olympics. But since the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the human rights situation in China has worsened, with Xi establishing a techno-authoritarian state whose soaring budget for internal security has overtaken the country’s massive military budget. An increasingly repressive internal machinery, aided by an Orwellian surveillance system, has fostered a state strategy to culturally smother ethnic minorities in their traditional homelands, including through demographic change and harsh policing.

It was in 2015 that Beijing defeated Almaty (Kazakhstan) to win the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Just in the period since 2015, China, among other things, has established forward military bases on human-made islands in the South China Sea, set up the Xinjiang gulag, militarized the Himalayan borderlands, weaponized debt and gobbled up Hong Kong.

The world must not turn a blind eye to such actions, which thus far have not invited any meaningful Western sanctions. Xi has only been emboldened by the fact that his draconian, expansionist actions have essentially been cost-free. 

Just as other powers’ appeasement emboldened Hitler’s expansionism, leading to World War II, the international failure to impose tangible costs for Chinese aggression is likely to beget more aggression. Indeed, the present business-as-usual approach to China is tantamount to appeasement. 

If the Beijing Winter Olympics were held without any censure of the Xi regime, it would be an insult to every Uyghur, every Tibetan, every jailed Hong Kong democracy activist and every imprisoned Chinese political dissident. A boycott-free Games that wrap up smoothly would only encourage Xi to embark on fresh repression and expansionism.

Make no mistake: If Xi’s China stays on its present path, open conflict with the West and with its neighbors, from Japan to India, would become inevitable.

For the CCP, sports and politics have long been inseparable. From its boycott of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne (Australia) to its more recent bullying tactics against the N.B.A., England’s Premier League and others, the party has treated sports as politics by other means. It has used threats of withdrawing lucrative sports contracts, broadcast deals and sponsorship opportunities to buy silence on its human rights record.

When China can wield sports as a political weapon, is there any reason why democratic powers should avoid giving it a taste of its own medicine to help put the CCP on notice? A coordinated boycott of the Games would convey to the Chinese people that the CCP’s rogue actions risk isolating China.

Harmonized action on the Games, even if largely symbolic, could serve as a first step toward galvanizing a larger international movement against Xi’s regime, if not triggering a “boycott China” movement along the lines of the sustained global boycott that helped end the apartheid system in South Africa.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

© The Hill, 2021.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, has become increasingly emboldened in pursuing his expansionist agenda, in part because three successive American presidents have allowed him to act with impunity. Having swallowed Hong Kong, is China itching to move on Taiwan, the island democracy whose incorporation Xi recently called a “historic mission”? By rehearsing amphibious and air attacks, China has displayed a readiness to seize Taiwan by force.

Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defense against tyranny. This small island with almost as many people as much-larger Australia is a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international semiconductor business. Its absorption will not only make China a more formidable economic competitor to the United States, but also threaten global peace and critically accelerate the global chip shortage.

Encouraging Xi’s unrelenting expansionism is the fact that his heavy-handed actions at home and abroad thus far have essentially been cost-free. Take the South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Xi has forcibly redrawn, despite an international arbitral tribunal’s ruling invalidating China’s territorial claims there.

Then-President Obama seemed content to look the other way as Xi built artificial islands and militarized the South China Sea. This helped turn China’s contrived historical claims to that critical corridor into reality without firing a single shot. 

Under President Trump, despite a paradigm shift in America’s China policy, the administration prioritized a trade deal with Beijing and thus imposed largely symbolic sanctions when evidence of Xi’s Muslim gulag in Xinjiang emerged. Consequently, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era (which Washington acknowledges is genocide) has gone largely unpunished, even though the 1948 Genocide Convention requires its parties, which include the U.S., to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide.

When Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement was crushed and the city was brought into political lockstep with the Chinese Communist Party in breach of China’s United Nations-registered treaty with Britain, Xi and his inner circle remained untouched by the sanctions the Trump administration imposed. And all the 24 Chinese targeted by President Biden’s administration in March for their Hong Kong role had already been hit with sanctions by the Trump administration.  

Now there is real danger that, encouraged by Biden’s recent shift toward a more conciliatory approach toward China, Xi will move against Taiwan.

In fact, the exit of a vanquished America from Afghanistan, by underscoring the irreversible decline of U.S. power, may make Xi believe that China has an opening to seize Taiwan. Chinese state media have warned Taiwan that it will be abandoned by America in the face of a Chinese invasion, just as the Afghanistan disaster unfolded after the U.S. threw its allies – the Afghan government and military – under the bus.

Biden has accentuated America’s credibility problems. Asked at an Oct. 21 CNN town hall whether “the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked,” Biden said emphatically, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” Then the White House quickly walked back his words, saying “there is no change in our policy” on Taiwan, which is centered on “strategic ambiguity” about U.S. intentions. 

Once a policy of ambiguity is described in virtually unequivocal terms by the president, and then the White House dials it back, it sends the wrong message to Beijing. Xi may read this as a lack of U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan and plan to invade Taiwan at an opportune time when America is distracted.

With its increasing bullying, Xi’s dictatorship is seeking to normalize hostile pressure on Taiwan. If not outright invasion, Beijing could seek to slowly throttle Taiwan in order to force it to accept “reunification,” including by cutting off its undersea cables, internet connections and liquified natural-gas imports. 

But if Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the Biden presidency without inviting a major blowback, he will likely employ military force. In fact, the probability of a surprise Chinese invasion will be greater if Biden is seen as lacking the strategic vision and political will to defend Taiwan against an attack. 

In this light, the imperative for Washington is not merely to embrace strategic clarity by abandoning the outdated strategic ambiguity policy, which was formulated when China was still backward and in no position to annex Taiwan. Rather, the U.S. must shift from a “one China” policy to an overt “one China, one Taiwan” posture that recognizes the island’s independent status. And Xi should be left in no doubt that the U.S. would make China pay a heavy price if it attempted to invade or choke Taiwan.

A U.S. that fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally, including Japan, which hosts more American soldiers today than any other foreign country. Taiwan (Imperial Japan’s first colony) is geographically an extension of the Japanese archipelago.

If the U.S. were to put up with a Chinese conquest of Taiwan, it would make the same fatal mistake as the participants of the 1938 Munich Conference who, yielding to Adolf Hitler, transferred the predominantly German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany. That concession paved the way for World War II.

Taiwan’s fall would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia, including by triggering the unraveling of U.S.-led alliances there. And China would emerge as a pressing military threat to the U.S. itself.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

In a defiant speech on Aug. 31, President Biden claimed that his precipitous exit from Afghanistan, which facilitated the terrorist takeover of that country, would allow the United States to focus on its “serious competition with China.” But there are now growing signs that Biden’s Afghan blunder has weakened his hand against China and opened greater strategic space for America’s main rival.

Illustrating his weakened position, the president has just capitulated to China’s hostage-taking tactics. In a deal Biden finalized with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the U.S. dropped its extradition case against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, allowing her to return home from Canada, in exchange for China’s release of Canadian hostages Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who spent 1,019 days in Chinese prisons on trumped-up charges. 

The hostages-for-Meng swap is the latest example of Biden’s efforts to ease tensions with China by propitiating Xi. By rewarding Xi’s use of rogue tactics, the deal sends a chilling message to foreigners working in China.

Earlier, Biden bowed to another Chinese demand — that the U.S. stop tracing the origins of the COVID-19 virus, even though the world has a right to know if China caused the worst disaster of our time, which has already killed more than 4.7 million people. Twelve days after Kabul’s fall, Biden announced on Aug. 27 that the intelligence inquiry he initiated had ended, even though it failed to uncover the genesis of the pandemic.

Xi’s regime, involved in one of the greatest cover-ups ever seen, doesn’t want the truth to come out. After all, if China’s negligence or complicity spawned the world’s worst public-health catastrophe in more than a century, it would constitute a crime against humanity.

Biden should have ordered the U.S. intelligence community to keep searching for the true origins of the virus until it reached a definitive conclusion. By not extending the inquiry’s 90-day deadline, Biden met an important Chinese demand.

Since the Afghan debacle, Biden has gone to extraordinary lengths to alleviate tensions with China. Last week began with the president’s China-conciliatory address at the United Nations and ended with Meng’s return home to a hero’s welcome.  

During a recent 90-minute phone conversation with Xi, Biden sought to explain U.S. actions toward China “in a way that [is] not misinterpreted as…somehow trying to sort of undermine Beijing in particular ways,” according to the readout from a senior U.S. official. In fact, during the call, Xi spurned Biden’s face-to-face summit offer, demanding that the U.S. first soften its China policy and tamp down rhetoric.

As if heeding Xi’s demand, Biden in his UN address never uttered the word “China,” even as he called out Iran and North Korea. The address stood in stark contrast with then-President Trump’s 2020 UN speech, which demanded the world “hold China accountable” for unleashing the “China virus.” Biden’s speech defensively stated, “We’re not seeking – say it again, we are not seeking – a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

Such fecklessness appears out of step with reality, given that an ambitious and expansionist China is actively working to supplant the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power while waging a cold war against it. Since Biden assumed the presidency, the U.S. has initiated most moves for high-level talks with China, including the latest phone call.

The White House’s dropping of fraud charges against Meng, the daughter of the man who founded the military-linked Huawei, is a real shot in the arm for Xi, whose increasing appetite for taking major risks poses an international challenge. In a striking paradox, Meng departed for home from Canada on the day Biden hosted the first face-to-face leaders’ meeting of the Quad, a U.S.-India-Japan-Australia grouping catalyzed by China’s muscular foreign policy and rogue behavior.

Deals with hostage-takers usually boomerang. For example, to secure the release of Bowe Bergdahl, a captured U.S. Army sergeant who had deserted his unit in Afghanistan, President Obama in 2014 freed five Taliban leaders from Guantánamo Bay. The release of the five – “the hardest of the hardcore,” as the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said then – proved costly.

An emboldened Taliban sharply escalated its attacks in Afghanistan, bringing Afghan and U.S.-NATO forces under increasing pressure. This eventually led to Trump’s one-sided withdrawal deal with the Taliban in February 2020 and then to Biden’s recent handover of Afghanistan to that Pakistan-backed terrorist militia. Today, the five former Guantánamo inmates are senior officials of the new Afghan regime, made up of a who’s who of international terrorism.

The Biden-arranged swap is likely to prove detrimental to the free world. The deal may have unwittingly vindicated Chinese propaganda that the 2018 Canadian arrest of Meng on a U.S. warrant was politically driven and that the U.S. and Canadian judicial systems do not operate independent of political interests.

Indeed, the White House has shamed the rule of law by terminating a legal case through a political deal with a hostage-holding regime, thereby setting a terrible precedent in international relations.

The deal will inspire other hostage-takers, including the Taliban. To press for sanctions relief and other demands, the Taliban is already obstructing the evacuation of the remaining stranded foreigners from Afghanistan, including Afghans with Western passports.

More ominously, America’s yielding to China’s thuggish diplomacy of hostage-taking will encourage greater Chinese defiance of international rules and norms. Xi’s regime doesn’t care about the costs to the country’s image, which explains why, despite unfavorable views of China rising to near historic highs, it is busy corrupting, coercing or co-opting other states.

In pursuing a more conciliatory approach toward China, Biden has given respectability to the rogue-state tactic of taking hostages, making it virtually certain that the two freed Canadians will not be the last foreigners seized by Beijing as bargaining chips.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

Naypyitaw’s generals treated as bigger threat than the terrorists controlling Kabul

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

No sooner had the Taliban completed their lightning-quick conquest of Afghanistan than U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Washington was ready to work on “counterterrorism” with the same marauding Islamist force that has so much American blood on its hands.

No less shocking was the statement from the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, that it is “possible” the U.S. will coordinate with the Taliban to conduct counterterrorism strikes on other Islamist terrorists.

British Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Nick Carter called the Taliban — responsible for the killing of more than 2,000 American soldiers and hundreds of allied troops — “country boys” that “live by a code of honor and a standard.” Carter’s claim that the Taliban have “changed” and “want an Afghanistan that is inclusive for all” has already been contradicted.

The Taliban’s all-male regime of hard-core extremists is a who’s who of international terrorism, with 17 of the 33 cabinet ministers on the United Nations’ terrorism-related sanctions list, and four former Guantanamo Bay inmates and several others who remain U.S.-designated global terrorists. The regime is headed by Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a U.N.-listed terrorist and architect of the 2001 destruction of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan.

The Anglo-American outreach to the Taliban stands in eerie contrast with U.S. and British efforts to isolate and squeeze another of India’s neighbors — military-ruled Myanmar. It is as if Myanmar’s military government is a bigger threat to international security than a Kabul regime run by some of the world’s deadliest terrorists.

Military rule is nothing new to Myanmar, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries whose failure to construct an inclusive national identity has allowed old ethnic insurgencies to fester. Directly or indirectly, the military has always called the shots in Myanmar, a factor stifling the resource-rich nation’s potential.Soldiers set up barricades in Yangon on Feb. 15: military rule is nothing new to Myanmar,   © NurPhoto/Getty Images

Yet, after the latest military takeover on Feb. 1, the U.S. and Britain took the lead in slapping a series of sanctions on Myanmar, with America even suspending bilateral trade ties. Washington says its 2013 Trade and Investment Framework Agreement with Myanmar will remain suspended until the return of a democratically elected government, of which there is currently little hope.

The U.S.-led efforts to use economic and political levers to unseat the military regime have only emboldened insurgent groups to step up their violent campaigns. A shadow government formed by opponents of military rule recently called for taking up arms against the regime. More than 220,000 people have already been displaced by internal conflict since the military takeover.

Yet, the U.S. and Britain appear reconciled to a terrorist regime ruling Afghanistan. In an echo of Gen. Carter’s call to be “very careful about using the term ‘enemy'” for the Taliban, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan has declined to call the militia an enemy of the U.S., saying, “It’s hard to put a label on it.”

In fact, Britain responded to the Taliban’s conquest by immediately announcing a doubling of its aid to Afghanistan. And U.S. President Joe Biden — not content with his Afghan surrender gifting troves of American-made weapons to the Taliban, making them the first terrorist group to acquire advanced air and land-based capabilities — is sending $64 million in aid to Afghanistan. As The Wall Street Journal put it, the Taliban “have overnight turned into a courted U.S. partner.”

The White House has praised the Taliban for being “businesslike and professional” on evacuations. They have certainly been businesslike and professional in detaining and executing perceived opponents, in ongoing ethnic cleansing and in their Pakistan-aided brutal assaults on the Panjshir Valley, the last resistance stronghold, where tens of thousands of residents have been uprooted amid widespread killings.

Meanwhile, Taliban death squads, going door to door, have been hunting down and killing those who assisted the previous government, including, in one documented case, first pulling out all the victim’s fingernails. The Taliban have been businesslike and professional too in their imposition of seventh-century Islamic practices from the Arab world that are alien to Afghan culture.

The Taliban have “changed” in one respect: In place of the blue burqa that women were made to wear during their 1996-2001 rule, they have now prescribed a full-body covering of a different color, black.

The U.S. outreach to the Taliban, including drawing specious distinctions between “good” and “bad” terrorists, is designed to soften the blow from Biden’s handover of a mineral-rich country to a militia that is a wing of the Pakistani deep state. But such an effort cannot camouflage the damage to America’s international credibility and standing.

More fundamentally, the Anglo-American courting of the Taliban highlights the selective, geopolitics-driven approach to combating terrorism, which is why the U.S.-launched global war on terrorism has yielded little even two decades after its launch. The scourge of transnational terrorism has only spread deeper and wider.

The Taliban’s rollback of civil, human and women’s rights, brutal executions, replacement of education and music with religious dogma, and enslavement of prepubescent girls through forced “marriage” to their fighters ought to spur a concerted global response.

The last thing the world can afford is condoning the Taliban’s medieval practices, misogyny and barbarity. Yet the West remains a mute spectator to the Taliban’s ongoing atrocities.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”