{"id":63127,"date":"2021-03-15T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2021-03-14T19:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=63127"},"modified":"2021-03-14T19:03:45","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T08:03:45","slug":"first-quad-leaders-summit-polishes-the-democratic-diamond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/first-quad-leaders-summit-polishes-the-democratic-diamond\/","title":{"rendered":"First Quad leaders\u2019 summit polishes the democratic diamond"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

\u2018We strive for a region that is free, open, inclusive, healthy, anchored by democratic\u202fvalues, and unconstrained by coercion.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 Quad leaders\u2019 joint statement, \u2018The spirit of the Quad<\/a>\u2019, 13 March 2021<\/p>\n

The leaders\u2019 meeting of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partners Australia, India, Japan and the United States is a potent promise, a sparkling moment for the reborn \u2018democratic security diamond\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Quad mission ranges from vaccines on land to vessels at sea: finance, manufacture and distribute one billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines across Asia by the end of 2022; \u2018meet challenges to the maritime order in the East and South China Seas\u2019.<\/p>\n

Four disparate democracies can do much together, not least to reassure Southeast Asia that it has agency and options (Quad-speak: \u2018strong support for ASEAN\u2019s unity and centrality\u2019).<\/p>\n

The ambit and arc of the Quad\u2019s ambitions can mess with Beijing\u2019s mind. Given all the hurt China has been dishing, what\u2019s not to like?<\/p>\n

The Quad leaders\u2019 statement talks about responding to Covid-19 and climate change, and addressing \u2018shared challenges\u2019 in cyber\u00a0space, critical technologies and\u00a0counterterrorism. Then there\u2019s the biggest \u2018C\u2019 of all, an emphatic presence even when not mentioned. The irony is that China is the godfather<\/a> of Quad 2.0<\/a>. The four democracies are present at the creation, but conception came from China\u2019s coercion.<\/p>\n

Australia walked away from Quad 1.0 in 2008<\/a> because we had high hopes about China and doubts about Japan and India; Canberra bet on Beijing rather than Tokyo and New Delhi. Now the race has changed dramatically, the stakes are even higher, and Australia puts new wagers on Japan and India to reinforce its traditional bet on the US.<\/p>\n

Quad 1.0 sunk, Kevin Rudd says, because the US and India weren\u2019t keen<\/a>, and neither was Japan<\/a> after Shinzo Abe departed from his first term as Japan\u2019s prime minister in 2007. Quad 2.0 arrived, Rudd notes, because Xi Jinping has \u2018fundamentally altered<\/a> the landscape\u2019 by projecting Chinese power, and strategic circumstances have \u2018changed profoundly\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The mission of Quad 2.0 becomes more than patrolling the Indo-Pacific\u2014the ambit of Quad ambition meets today\u2019s angst and ambiguity.<\/p>\n

Returning as Japan\u2019s prime minister in 2012, Abe began work on the Quad\u2019s second coming, describing it as a \u2018democratic security diamond\u2019<\/a> that would be all about the maritime domain. Abe\u2019s diamond image was based on \u2018a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US state of Hawaii form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific\u2019.<\/p>\n

The logic of the democracy diamond today is to outplay and outweigh a China that the US describes as an assertive competitor<\/a>, \u2018combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system\u2019.<\/p>\n

Australia, India, Japan and the US are being driven together as much as they\u2019re naturally coming together. A new cohesion is shown by the simple fact that the three prime ministers and the president issued a joint statement from their summit; previously, when the Quad foreign ministers met, each country gave a separate written account of the talks.<\/p>\n

The summit statement<\/a> on \u2018the spirit of the Quad\u2019 offers lots of sparkling facets. The outcomes fact sheet<\/a> pins detail to the ambition, with a Quad vaccine partnership and vaccine experts group; a climate working group; and a critical and emerging technology group on standards, telecommunications, biotechnology and supply chains. The contests will happen in labs and factories as well as on the far seas.<\/p>\n

As an aside on the internal battles of Australia\u2019s Liberal\u2013National coalition government, the Quad statement about climate change (\u2018a global priority\u2019) marks another step in Scott Morrison\u2019s delicate effort to herd his fractious flock up the path to the UN climate conference in November.<\/p>\n

From domestic politics to geopolitics, the game is on the move.<\/p>\n

For the Biden administration, the Quad puts an exclamation point on the shout that the US is back. The democracy diamond demonstrates America\u2019s chameleon<\/a> skill<\/a> in Asia: the ability to do formal alliances (Australia, Japan and South Korea), de facto alliances (Singapore and Taiwan) and partial or quasi-military relationships (Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam). The Quad demonstrates India\u2019s slow, firming shift to become a de facto US ally. The US military says what\u2019s being built with India can be the \u2018defining partnership of the 21st century\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ever seeking to anchor the US in Asia, Canberra and Tokyo now have another anchor point in New Delhi. The anchor image responds to a permanent reality: China will always be in Asia, while the US presence is always a choice Washington makes.<\/p>\n

Choosing the Quad, the US is renewing its promise to the Indo-Pacific as much as it\u2019s joining with three fellow democracies.<\/p>\n

The head of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, says \u2018the diamond of democracies\u2019<\/a> can build into something bigger: \u2018Not in terms of security alone, but in terms of how we might approach … the global economy, critical technologies like telecommunications and 5G, collaboration on the international order\u2014just much to be done diplomatically and economically.\u2019<\/p>\n

The Quad isn\u2019t an alliance. The Indo-Pacific democratic diamond won\u2019t match the four-pointed NATO star. The outlook of the Quad members is as different as their democracies (note the time-zone differences, stretching across the date line, in conducting the virtual summit of the four leaders).<\/p>\n

US military flexibility\u2014that chameleon ability\u2014means the Quad rests on its alliances with Australia and Japan and the de facto alliance forming with India.<\/p>\n

As Michael Green observes<\/a> from Washington:<\/p>\n

In military terms, the US\u2013Japanese\u2013Australian trio is far more interoperable than the four are together, though the recent resumption of joint naval exercises will help. The Quad will be one part of a variable geometry of alliances and diplomacy in Asia. After this summit, it will now clearly be one of the most important parts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indo-Pacific maritime security is the \u2018one issue that makes the Quad the Quad\u2019<\/a>, Salvatore Babones argues:<\/p>\n

The Quad is never going to go to war with China. In any case, treaty alliances and military procurement partnerships are more effective tools for preventing war than a loose international grouping. What the Quad can do is provide a backbone for broad Indo-Pacific maritime security cooperation that tamps down China\u2019s brinkmanship across the region.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Quad will feed into US musings<\/a> about reforming the 1st Fleet<\/a>, last on station in the Pacific in 1973, to increase its naval presence in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The 1st Fleet could be headquartered<\/a> in Singapore and\/or Western Australia. (After the lengthy wrestle about paying for US Marine Corps facilities in Darwin, Canberra is match-tough to grapple with the Pentagon over the dollars.)<\/p>\n

Not so long ago, a bigger US presence in the ocean India calls its own would have produced howls from New Delhi. Now such a build-up would fit with India\u2019s hardening<\/a> strategic understanding of China\u2019s hegemony vision<\/a>, and the maritime dimensions of the Quad mission.<\/p>\n

As diamonds are formed by high temperature and pressure, so the Quad bonds four democratic powers that feel the force and weight<\/a> of Asia\u2019s coming power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018We strive for a region that is free, open, inclusive, healthy, anchored by democratic\u202fvalues, and unconstrained by coercion.\u2019 \u2014 Quad leaders\u2019 joint statement, \u2018The spirit of the Quad\u2019, 13 March 2021 The leaders\u2019 meeting of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":63137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,69,135,2328,31],"class_list":["post-63127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia","tag-india","tag-japan","tag-quad","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFirst Quad leaders\u2019 summit polishes the democratic diamond | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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