Opinion | Why the US-led Quad alliance won’t realise its ‘Asian Nato’ ambition against China

Name: Pompeo urges Asian allies to stand against Beijing’s ‘corruption, coercion’
Uploaded: 2020-10-29T17:00:07.000Z
Duration: 39 s
Description: Pompeo urges Asian allies to stand against Beijing’s ‘corruption, coercion’

Beyond the informal grouping’s four members of US, Japan, India and Australia, there are few other truly free and democratic countries in Asia

Many in the region are also reluctant to jeopardise ties with China, especially given its vaccine diplomacy in time of a global pandemic

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Japan’s maritime self-defence soldiers on board the helicopter destroyer JS Kaga during a joint exercise with US forces off the south of Japan on October 26. Photo: Reuters

Joshua Park

Published: 1:00am, 30 Oct 2020Updated: 2:33am, 30 Oct 2020

Just as Nato became a unified bastion of democracy against the Soviet Union, the Quad is hoping to become its era-appropriate equivalent: a bulwark against the rise of China. Unfortunately for Washington and its allies, that is unlikely to happen.

The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal security alliance between the United States, Japan, India and Australia. Drawing together democratic powers along the Asia-Pacific rim, the alliance was initiated by former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2007. Despite a decade-long hiatus, the Quad resurrected itself in 2017, reasserting its role as the “Asian Arc of Democracy”. The parallels to the Nato transatlantic security alliance draw themselves.

October 6, 2020, marked the first high-level Quad meeting in over a year. Despite the pandemic, the four foreign ministers gathered in Tokyo. In a Covid-19 world that mandates social distancing, the gathering itself was a display of the meeting’s significance.

It was in the shadow of the proverbial elephant in the room that lay just over a thousand miles away, that the four foreign ministers met to discuss how to counter the rise of China.

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Pompeo urges Asian allies to stand against Beijing’s ‘corruption, coercion’

In a press conference on the day of the Quad meeting, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “Once we’ve institutionalised what we’re doing – the four of us together – we can begin to build out a true security framework.” Ever since the Quad’s revival in 2017 and the increasingly Beijing-hostile Trump administration, international-relations watchers have speculated about the Quad’s formalisation and expansion.

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