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Opinion | Will the Quad’s focus on vaccines, rare earths help it win friends in Asean?
- The grouping’s cooperation in vaccines and rare earths are a challenge to China’s monopolies, suggesting it will pay attention to economic, not just military power
- While reducing the region’s economic dependence on China will be hard, it should discuss with Asean countries ways to create new patterns of economic integration
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The first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of India, Japan, Australia and the US – a grouping known as the Quadrilateral Security Initiative or “Quad” – resulted in two major policy decisions.
First, the four countries agreed to pool their resources to manufacture and distribute more than 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine to countries in the Indo-Pacific region – with a particular focus on members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Second, they agreed to create a procurement chain to reduce China’s monopoly on rare earth elements, which are critical for hi-tech industries ranging from mobile phones to radars. China currently controls more than 60 per cent of the rare earths market.
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These initiatives signal an important realisation and course correction in the Quad’s China strategy: that geopolitical encirclement will remain incomplete without economic containment.
Since 2007, when the Quad countries first came together for joint naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal, the grouping’s agenda has often been driven and judged by the intensity and tempo of its military cooperation.
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But such overemphasis on security relationships is both insufficient and counterproductive.
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