‘The Quad’ will meet in Singapore – can it balance China’s influence or is it ‘stoking a new cold war’?
- The four countries – the US, Japan, India and Australia – aim to provide an alternative model to China’s authoritarian rule and state-directed lending for infrastructure projects
- Beijing views the group with suspicion, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi mocking the bloc as a ‘headline-grabbing idea’ that would dissipate ‘like the sea foam’
Potentially the most important meeting in Asia this week isn’t on any official summit agenda, features no head of state and certainly doesn’t include China.
Senior officials from Australia, India, Japan and the US – a set of countries known as “the Quad” – plan to meet Thursday on the sidelines of a regional summit in Singapore. It will be only the third meeting of the group since its revival last year as a counterweight to China’s growing economic and military might.
Australia sees the Quad as an “important sort of architecture in the region” that can cooperate economically, militarily and strategically, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters on Wednesday.
The Quad’s origins date back to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated large parts of Asia, after which the four countries joined together to provide humanitarian relief. Key early advocates included Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had a brief stint as leader more than a decade ago, and then US vice-president Dick Cheney.
Stoking a new cold war is out of sync with the times and inciting bloc confrontation will find no market
Senior officials from the Quad held their first meeting in 2007, and the four countries participated in joint naval exercises. Yet the moves provoked protests from Beijing, and the grouping fell apart particularly after Kevin Rudd – a Mandarin speaker who favoured engagement with China – became Australia’s prime minister later that year.
Since then, China has become increasingly assertive, building and militarising artificial structures in the South China Sea, establishing a military base at Djibouti on the route to the Suez Canal, and financing the construction of transport projects across the region. US allies like Australia have also been stung by allegations of China’s attempts influence in their domestic politics.