Cautious Quadrilateralities

There was the sound like a rumor without any echo of history, really beginning.

Following the recent Chinese overtures towards Arunachal, Ladakh, and Sikkim - notably sending troops, altering maps, taking land and calling for peace - there now hopefully would have enkindled some degree of sovereign urgency among Delhi's international security leaders towards a reassessment of some of our geostrategic priorities. So understandably (with some hindsight) while we might want to avoid symmetrical competition with an obviously bigger opponent and focus on emerging capabilities which could break an established stalemate and provide sustainable asymmetric advantages to constrain CCP actions in future. Delhi and even Dharamshala both understand this very well, after all. And other than the slowly simmering borders and periodic geo-economic swings, India also has a bit of a civilizational obligation to herself that Asia doesn't turn into a CCP fiefdom.

Under this kind of environment, there has lately been a resurgence and expansion of the old US-JP-AU-IN HADR (The Quad) alliance which in itself is a center of varied interests owing to its strong political proximity with maritime dominance and the welfares originating from a post-pandemic diversification of China based supply chains. There have even been some efforts to promulgate the idea that this arrangement is not against China. In all honesty, unless China itself joins the mix, any attempts to regulate the security of Indo-Pacific waters will have to take on a character which faces China as the opponent. This is a bit of a Tolstoyan case of the fate of nations being independent from the individual wills of their kings and ministers.

That said, there are valid reasons to reconsider the strategic utility of institutionalizing these emerging structures. Japan is a treaty-based US ally. Australia is a US ally which with RCEP is unlikely to break from an economic dependence on China. The US of course, is the incumbent politico-military arbiter of liberal world order. None of these shares a land boundary with or has massive trigger-happy territorial disputes with China. We do. But the quadrilateral isn't about India, it is about "Indo-Pacific". And that thick line needs more policy thickening, because given West's ideological and economic competition with China, it can be easy to surmise that the IOR or the Indo aspects of Indo-Pacific will recieve less attention than the Pacific aspects. Besides, a third of the worldwide maritime trade passes through the South China Sea that is being contested over, and the Chinese aren't exactly going to accept some fancy rules based order in strictly diplomatic manners.

It can also be expected that more and more states joining this arrangement will still try to maximize their relational benefits while minimizing the individual costs even if that isn't in the grander strategic interests of the arrangement itself. It is well known that specific goal oriented coalitions with clear objectives are better than a general-purpose bloc riding-the-waves of international waters. The military incentives here rest with the former, or in very localized regional arrangements between states trying to order their own backyards. Unless there are strong political and economic incentives, no one is going to make commitments of manpower and resources for expeditionary operations to defend foreign interests. So it can be fairly argued in this case that expansion for sake of expansion, while gaining more legitimacy in the eyes of public and possibly even some international institutions, would tend to dilute the coalitionary maritime defense potential unless carefully guarded against.

China too is aware of the possible maritime encircling and will focus on global economy to find its way out. Consequently it has revamped its foreign investment regime and launched a slew of techno-economic armamentarium including the central bank's digital currency which could in future help in renminbi internationalization, generating non-trade currency demands, and in getting the CCP a hold over China's burgeoning money networks and perhaps over the slippery oil shores as well. Considering 'all the things that need consideration' maybe the best way to think about the current stratagems is to affirmatively rephrase Derek Walcott that the sea is indeed the history.