Is the Quad finally on the front foot?

On Friday (11 February), Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne hosted Indian Minister of External Affairs Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoshimasa Hayashi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the third in-person Quad Foreign Ministers meeting.

The ministers met in Melbourne to discuss joint efforts across a number of issues, including cyber and critical technology, countering disinformation, counterterrorism, maritime security, humanitarian and disaster response, and climate change.

The Quad counterparts reiterated support for ASEAN centrality in the region, endorsing the implementation of ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific.

A key theme of the dialogue was the growing threat posed by authoritarian regimes, with the foreign ministers condemning encroachments on national sovereignty amid military and economic intimidation from China.  

“Quad partners champion the free, open and inclusive rules-based order, rooted in international law, that protects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of regional countries,” the QUAD partners noted in a joint statement.

“We reaffirm our commitment to upholding and strengthening the rules-based multilateral trading system, with the World Trade Organization at its core.

“We oppose coercive economic policies and practices that run counter to this system and will work collectively to foster global economic resilience against such actions.”

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The Quad partners also condemned North Korea’s “destabilising” ballistic missile launches, expressing their joint commitments to the “complete denuclearisation” of the authoritarian state.  

However, no major initiatives were announced following the Quad meeting or following bilateral discussions between Australia and the United States under their newly established AUKUS partnership.

But according to Michael Shoebridge, director of the defence, strategy, and national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, these “boring” outcomes are a positive sign.

“It’s rare in the politics of diplomacy to have no new ‘announceables’ or major initiatives from key meetings like the Quad involving Indian, Japanese, American and Australian foreign ministers in Melbourne on Friday,” he writes.

“It’s even rarer for that to be a fine thing.

“But Melbourne has hopefully set a pattern for other Quad meetings in 2022 – a focus on hard work, implementation and delivery, with a common, positive purpose, and without the need for shiny new talking points.”

Shoebridge claims the joint statement suggests the work is “coming together”, producing a sense of “optimism and energy”, in contrast with the “defensive tenor” of previous discussions over the past five years.

The former approach, he argues, ceded ground to China by employing a more reactionary strategy.

The tide began to turn last year, after new life was breathed into the Quad and AUKUS was established.

“The good news is that even on their way to Melbourne, the US, Indian and Japanese ministers all knew this,” Shoebridge continues.

He points to remarks from India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who said the Quad would be “operationalised” in Melbourne.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said the Quad was “becoming a powerful mechanism” for responses to key security challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, strengthening maritime security to “push back against aggression and coercion in the Indo-Pacific”, and technology engagement.

“All this is evidence that our region’s most powerful democracies have moved from thinking and proposing to implementing and acting,” Shoebridge writes.

“That’s enormously positive and energising, and sorely needed not just in the Indo-Pacific but in the wider world.”

This is also reflected by the amount of time and resource the United States is devoting to the partnership, despite facing an array of other geopolitical challenges around the world, including the ongoing border tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

“We need to get less surprised about the ability of this great power to walk and chew gum. And we also need to understand a new phenomenon that is strangely making this easier,” Shoebridge observes.

The newly invigorated Quad partnership, he continues, juxtaposes with the reaffirmation of Beijing’s alliance with Moscow earlier this month.

According to Shoebridge, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are seeking to legitimise their coercive actions against Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively.

“In their lengthy joint statement, among anxious words about ‘colour revolutions’ and fears of external enemies, Xi and Putin tried to convey a picture of themselves to the world as cosy, empowered autocrats, confident enough to pretend that authoritarianism is democracy, aggression is pacifism and political repression is protection of human rights,” he writes.

“The two problems they have are that simply saying all this doesn’t make it true, and the disconcerting fact that the world’s real democracies are graphic demonstrations of what actual freedom looks like: creative and messy, but powerful.”

But Shoebridge claims their attempts have backfired, instead enabling a broadest of regional security groupings – NATO, the EU, the Quad and AUKUS – to focus on common challenges.

He expects AUKUS negotiations to take a similar route to the Quad over the coming year.

“Five months of the 18-month implementation planning period the AUKUS leaders announced back in September have already sped by,” he notes.

“Among other signs of progress – like a three-nation nuclear information-sharing arrangement – Australia is putting additional diplomats into Vienna to do the heavy lifting around protecting nuclear non-proliferation, while also expanding Canberra-based non-proliferation expertise.

“That’s no doubt less exciting work than dealing with designing, building and operating nuclear submarines. But it’s essential to get right if Australia is to get the submarines and also implement AUKUS in a way that doesn’t just protect but strengthens the world’s controls around nuclear weapons.”

Shoebridge goes on to state that 2022 has “started well” for nations interested in “reversing the lazy narrative of declining, divided democracies confronted by confident autocracies”.

He lists three key reasons for optimism in Australia:

1. Australia is at the table in two of the peak groups in the region – the Quad and AUKUS;
2. Australia can therefore invest in making a larger contribution to regional security objectives; and
3. Progress is being made in deterring “aggressive autocrats”.

“Doing so will require clear-eyed cooperation backed by real-world capabilities, measured diplomacy and political will – as well as all the creativity our messy democracy and those of our partners and can bring to bear,” Shoebridge concludes.

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