The story of the Quad begins with a humanitarian crisis and not as a security grouping. After the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, it was the Indian Navy that acted as the “first responder” to deliver urgent supplies not only to its subcontinental neighbours — Sri Lanka and the Maldives — but also further afield to Thailand and Indonesia. This was despite India’s southern coast and the Andaman & Nicobar chain of islands being seriously impacted by the tsunami. When the United States (US) and its allies — Australia and Japan — began to engage in disaster-relief operations, they discovered that the Indian Navy was already active in the Indian Ocean region. It was the US that proposed that the naval forces of the four countries coordinate their relief operations so as to avoid duplication and to make delivery of supplies much more efficient and geared to local conditions and requirements. For about three weeks after the disaster struck, there were daily joint calls at the level of foreign secretary/under secretary (foreign affairs) to enable close coordination and joint action by India, the US, Japan, and Australia. This very positive experience in dealing with a maritime disaster collaboratively, led to the birth of the Quadrilateral, as an institutionalised forum of the four countries, with an agenda of regular consultations on maritime security, disaster monitoring, and relief. This was a limited agenda and India was keen to avoid the forum being a security grouping. In the grouping, India was the only country that was not a military ally of the US. The country most enthusiastic about the Quad was Japan, then under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had begun to talk about the Indo-Pacific as the “confluence of the two oceans” — the Indian and the Pacific Oceans — and regarded India as a central pillar of this geopolitical theatre. It was at the strong urging of both the US and Japan that India agreed to the first senior official-level meeting in Manila in 2007, on the margins of the Asean Regional Forum (“Asean” stands for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs attended the meeting.
It was in 2007 that the US began signalling that it wanted to play down the role of the Quad. India was told that the US needed the cooperation of both Russia and China, as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, to pass consensus resolutions on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues. To placate Russia and China, which had reacted negatively to the setting up of the Quad, the initiative had to be put into cold storage for some time. China had earlier condemned the Quad as an incipient “Asian Nato” (Nato is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
Subsequently Australia, under a Labour government, which was partial to China, decided to make a public announcement, saying that it was only part of the alliance system led by the US and did not intend to be part of any alternative grouping. Since only India was not part of the alliance system, the Australian statement was received in India as a deliberate snub. The only country that remained committed to the Quad was Japan and Abe was furious with the US for having pulled the carpet from under the Quad partners. Since India had been cautious about the Quad to begin with, its demise did not cause much substantive damage, although the reliability of the US again came into question.
It was once again the US that made a concerted effort to revive the Quad as it began to craft a new Indo-Pacific strategy and focus on China as its main geopolitical rival. But this was after Barack Obama, after taking office as US President in 2009, initially pursued a policy of “strategic reassurance” with China, which involved respecting each other’s “core concerns” and cooperating on a whole host of regional and global issues, including issues on India and Pakistan. This led to a perception that the US and China were attempting to establish a “G2”, or a kind of global condominium. However, the Chinese overreached, thinking that the US was a declining power and ready to recognise Chinese primacy, certainly in the Pacific region. Obama’s official visit to China went badly, as compared to his predecessors’, and the US quickly gave up any idea of a G2 and instead began to talk of a “pivot to Asia”. The notion of the Indo-Pacific, pioneered by Japan, was then embraced by the US, and India again came into focus as the only credible power that could be a counterweight to China. The experience of quadrilateral cooperation during the tsunami was a contributory factor in this shift in US strategy. But it was not until 2017, again at Manila — on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit and Asean Regional Forum meeting — that senior officials met once more as the Quad. But India was very cautious about this revival, opposing the issue of any joint statement and basically played down its significance. It was during Donald Trump’s first term (2016-20) as President that the US made a strong pitch to India for upgrading the Quad to ministerial level. The Quad foreign ministers finally met in 2019.
Still smarting from the snub delivered by Australia in 2007, so blatantly to curry favour with China, India did not initially agree to Australia’s participation in the Malabar naval exercises, which initially began as an Indo-US initiative and was later extended to include Japan. Australia had first taken part in these exercises in 2007 and then decided not to continue its participation in deference to Chinese sensitivities. It was only in 2020 that Australia was invited to join the exercises. This was important because these exercises gave the Quad a security dimension even though they were not billed as a Quad initiative.
The Democrat-led administration of Joe Biden, who took office in 2021, carried forward Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy and upgraded the Quad, for the first time, to summit level in March 2021, though the meeting was held virtually owing to the pandemic. Thereafter, leaders’ meetings took place in Washington in September 2021, Tokyo in May 2022, Hiroshima in May 2023, on the sidelines of the G7 summit, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a guest, and Wilmington, US, in September last year. The frequency of these summits is remarkable. The agenda of cooperation among the Quad countries has also expanded to include:
- Vaccine partnership: A major public-health initiative to provide Covid vaccines to developing countries in the Indo-Pacific, with India as the major supplier;
- Climate change: Collaboration on climate action, clean energy, and sustainable infrastructure;
- Critical and emerging technologies: Providing secure supply chains for semiconductors, 5G communication system, and other critical technologies; and
- Maritime domain awareness: Enhancing information sharing to monitor maritime traffic in the Indo-Pacific and combat piracy, illegal fishing, and other illegal activities.
These activities were designed to attract a larger circle of East and Southeast Asian countries, which are wary of being drawn into an overtly anti-Chinese coalition. However, India has bilateral security arrangements with each of its Quad partners, though these have not yet been multilateralised, except in the case of the Malabar naval exercises.
In addition to the Quad, the American Indo-Pacific strategy has two components. One is the Australia-United Kingdom-US partnership (Aukus), under which the US and the United Kingdom (UK) are to provide Australia with nuclear submarines and eventually to manufacture them in Australia itself. These submarines would give Australia a long-range capability that would threaten China in the South China Sea and the Pacific. The US also persuaded its two key allies in the region — Japan and South Korea — to put aside their long-held animosities to cooperate together as a trilateral alliance. This has been a major step forward in shoring up US military capabilities against China. These have become the key to deterring a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Even though the US has a policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to its likely response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, there is a general recognition among the countries of the Indo-Pacific that Chinese control of Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait will confirm Chinese dominance of the Asian theatre. Therefore, any serious doubts about the Aukus or the US-Japan-South Korea alliance would also imply a diminished commitment to Taiwan’s defence. And this is where Trump in his second term has raised serious doubts about the US commitment to its Indo-Pacific strategy.
On the Quad, there was confidence in India that the US under Trump remained committed to it. The very first ministerial-level meeting after Trump’s inauguration as President this year was among the Quad foreign ministers, convened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It was also decided that the next Quad summit would take place this year in India and that Trump would travel to India for this. India-US relations have seriously deteriorated, thanks to Trump’s trade war against India and the unusual bonhomie we have been witnessing between the US and Pakistan. It seems unlikely that, given the current state of relations, Trump will visit India. The Quad summit may well be postponed indefinitely and go into another phase of hibernation. There are other negative pointers. While putting penalties on India for buying oil from Russia, Trump has exempted China, a bigger buyer of Russian oil. He has been actively courting Pakistan while deliberately downgrading relations with India. He has been talking about Chinese President Xi Jinping as his special friend and claims that a big deal with China is possible. He has been virtually begging for a summit with the Chinese leader.
In pursuing a “grand bargain” with China, he may be ready to sacrifice Taiwan. There are reports that Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has not been allowed to make a transit halt in the US on his way to Central America. The Taiwan defence minister, who was invited by his American counterpart to visit Washington, has been asked to defer his visit. If the US is no longer committed to the defence of Taiwan, then the other pillars of its Indo-Pacific strategy have little meaning. Aukus is already in serious doubt because the Pentagon now says it may not have nuclear submarines to spare. The Japanese and the South Koreans are already hedging their bets by reviving their engagement with China. It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that we are on the brink of another deep freeze for the Quad. India may have to go back to the drawing board to rethink its own
Indo-Pacific strategy. How India should respond to this new challenge must be a subject of separate consideration.
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 "Will the Quad slip into hibernation, again?")
