AUKUS is emphatically a security grouping to contain China. Security cooperation between individual Quad countries predates the Quad, is limited, and often works bilaterally through the two-plus-two framework (defense and foreign minister meetings). The Quad is not an Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and has no commitment to collective security. The announcement of AUKUS has underlined some of these contradictions. It is also extremely sensitive to criticism, and any references to the rising authoritarianism and illiberalism that the Modi government has been accused of will potentially derail relationships.įinally, while the U.S.-India partnership has progressed rapidly over the past few years, in some quarters, India remains a little wary of the United States as a long-term reliable and trustworthy partner. But that will not sit well with India, which has traditionally refrained from advocating for democracy and democratic ideals in its foreign policy. India is certainly worried about a rising China but also faces the reality that, as of this year, China overtook the United States to become its number-one trading partner.Īnother dilemma India faces is that any formal grouping of democracies through the Quad could raise expectations that it will be a vigorous proponent of promoting democracy abroad. India supposedly jettisoned nonalignment after the end of the Cold War, but it is still not willing to enter into an alliance with any country or group. India is uncomfortable with any conception of the Quad as an anti-China “alliance of democracies” (as U.S. Meanwhile, India had just faced a number of border skirmishes with China, making it more willing to invest in the Quad. It was resurrected (Quad 2.0) for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the Donald Trump administration saw the Indo-Pacific as a crucial theater of competition with China and thought India could play an important role in countering China in the region. Yet, the Quad was essentially dormant until 2017. The second was that all four Quad members believed that China’s rise and the reach of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) posed a threat to them and the region. The first was that the United States, Australia, India, and Japan have a vested interest in upholding the rules and norms of the current order augmenting existing institutions ensuring freedom of navigation and trade and promoting connectivity, economic development, and security within existing rules and standards. There were two underlying motivations behind this grouping and vision. The Quad was born from the vision of the Indo-Pacific as a single strategic space, where activities in one area would inevitably affect activities in the other. By 2007, Abe had made one of the earliest references to the Indo-Pacific as a strategic space by talking of “the dynamic coupling” of the Indian and Pacific Oceans and “the confluence of the two seas.”
In 2006, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, noted in a joint statement that “India, Japan, and other like-minded countries in the Asia-Pacific” needed to cooperate on mutual interests. The earliest seeds of the Quad grouping were sown in 2004, when the United States, Australia, India, and Japan came together to provide humanitarian assistance after the devastating Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. In particular, AUKUS highlights some of the dilemmas that India faces with regard to the Quad: whether to share or pass the burden to contain China in the Indo-Pacific and whether to commit to even greater reliance on the United States as its defense partner. Yet, for India, the new defense agreement is inextricably tied to its own participation in and strategic calculations vis-à-vis the Quad.
0 kommentar(er)
