What is the point of the Quad?

AMERICAN DIPLOMACY in Asia is revving up. Last week President Joe Biden announced a new pact with Australia and Britain, AUKUS, to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines. And on September 24th the leaders of America, Australia, India and Japan will gather in Washington, DC, for the first in-person meeting of another grouping, the “Quad”. Although its leaders have never sat down together, the group can trace its roots back to joint disaster relief after the Asian tsunami almost 17 years ago. Its communiqués talk of securing a “free, open, prosperous, rules-based and inclusive Indo-Pacific”. But what really unites the four countries is the spectre of China and its growing muscle. What is the Quad, and what does it want to achieve?

After the initial co-operation on disaster relief, America, Australia, India and Japan met in 2007 for a “quadrilateral dialogue” on security matters. Many bet the new bloc would fizzle. India, once non-aligned and still suspicious of anything that smacked of an alliance, was non-committal, but in the end it was Australia, discomfited by China’s prickly reaction, that was the first to abandon the group in 2008. Since then China has projected its power across Asia and the Pacific. And so, after the four countries’ foreign ministers got together at a gathering of the Association of South-East Asian Nations in 2017, the Quad returned.