“There’s an urgency to the Quad now,” Green said in a press call on Sept. 22. “And it has become really one of the most important parts of the diplomatic toolkit for these four countries.
“One of the main reasons is that [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has taken a much harsher line towards his neighbors, with violence against Indian troops in the Himalayan Mountains, a pronounced increase in PLA [People’s Liberation Army] military and paramilitary operations around Japan’s waters, a relentless embargo against Australia of exports of everything from wine to coal because of Australian government and expert criticism of China’s human rights, and so forth,” he said.
Securing the Indo-Pacific, Managing CCP Aggression
The CCP has labored to counter such a vision with its own, and to undermine or downplay the successes that the Quad has had in building relationships within the region.“China has tended to engage in disinformation campaigns about the nature and purpose of the Quad,” said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at CSIS.
“When you look at the Chinese information/disinformation space, China is trying to use all different messages to undermine how the Quad is perceived internationally and undermine how countries, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, view the Quad.”
Lin explained that these efforts frequently sought to sow discord among the Quad nations, as well as to stoke fears among other regional alliances, such as ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), that the Quad would seek to replace them.
Despite such efforts, however, Green and Lin agreed that this week’s summit signals that the nations involved are ready to leverage the Quad as a key means of integrating their combined powers toward mitigating CCP aggression.
“The Chinese hate it,” Green said. “The Southeast Asians are getting used to it. But for the four leaders, this is now a central part of how they’re going to manage an increasingly ambitious and aggressive China.”
“The Quad is not the only game in Asia,” Green said. “It’s also not a formal treaty. It’s a kind of an umbrella of these four powerful maritime democracies. And within that umbrella, the bilateral and trilateral relationships have continued to strengthen.”
AUKUS a Boon, Not a Barrier
The most notable such treaty is AUKUS, the recent military agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which will serve to equip Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.“China is now messaging that AUKUS itself will undermine the Quad,” Lin said.
“[AUKUS] isn’t a Quad agreement, but I think the Quad countries that are not in AUKUS—Japan and India—are quite pleased with this,” Green said, “because it will really for the next 50 years reset the trajectories in naval power in the Pacific, and from the perspective of those countries stabilize things as China massively builds up its naval forces.”
Following the summit, Green said that it’s likely that the Quad would continue to act in an ad hoc manner, responding to new situations as they develop, but that the forum could easily formalize or work synchronously with AUKUS should the CCP persist in aggressive or otherwise adventuristic behavior in the Indo-Pacific.
“The Quad navies have the ability to blunt Chinese expansion should they choose to cooperate in a more deliberate way,” Green said. “If Chinese ambitions and expansion and coercion grow, I expect you’d see that.”