Quadrilateral Home Truths

Context: The Indo-Paci?c is influenced by  Cold War vintage and pan-regional architectures divorced from the underlying security dynamics. The QUAD (The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) must resist this temptation to precipitate design over purpose.

4 Lessons to draw from the long arc of Asia’s history and geopolitics: 

• Absence of an “Indo Pacific system”: The efforts of the United States to encircle China through artificially creating a unitary system will be unsuccessful since there has been no such thing as Indo-Pacific System’.

• Rather, there were two systems- an Indian Ocean system and an East Asian system- with intricate sub-regional balances.
• Even the British empire never managed to combine India and the Pacific into a unitary system.

• The Indo-Pacific System possesses no prior experience of peace, prosperity and stability: Rather, long dynamic cycles of Chinese influence has brought turmoil in China and the collapse of the Asian system.

• The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is more based on regional tradition and historical circumstances rather than the European concept of ‘balance of power’.
• India and Japan have never balanced the Chinese power throughout their history as done by the ‘flanking powers’ (Britain and Russia) to resist revisionist challenges in the continent.

• Leveraging the sea lines of communication: The leverage must be judiciously wielded on India’s terms and not on the Quad’s because of the following reasons - 

• QUAD has little to offer materially with regards to India’s continental two-front dilemma.
• Ceding the chokepoint leverage to China will invite overwhelming Chinese pressure against the full range of India’s South Asian interest, to which QUAD is not much interested.

• QUAD as a check on Chinese Ambitions: India must develop ingrained habits of interoperable cooperation with its QUAD partners and pre-emptively dissuade China from mounting a naval challenge in its backyard. 

Conclusion: Friendships and not alliances, as noted by the PM in Shangri-La Dialogue (2018), must be able to resist armed revisionism and nudging regional geopolitics to cooperation rather than conflict.