By: Rishya Dharmani, Research Analyst, GSDN
The Biden administration had proposed SQUAD to bolster peace, mutual deterrence and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific. The US Secretary of Defence, Llyod George said, “We have chartered an ambitious course to advance that vision together” at the sidelines of the April 2024 meeting of Defence Ministers – Richard Marles (Australia), Kihara Minoru (Japan), Gilberto Teodoro (Philippines) and Lloyd Austin (US) in the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) in Hawaii. The seeds for this grouping were sown in the preliminary meeting of defence ministers in the 2023 Shangri La Dialogue. Later, joint maritime patrols in the hotly contested South China Sea (SCS), followed by a trilateral summit of American, Japanese and Phillipino leaders, further cemented this partnership.
This institutionalisation of SQUAD comes at the hills of regime change in the Philippines from pursuing a passivist policy towards China towards the current term of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s shift towards collaborating with the US to strengthen ‘integrated deterrence’ in the South China Sea (SCS). Further, Australia, in recent years, has also shed its reticence in irking China of not entering into strategic partnerships with others in the region. Japan also looks to wean away from its pacifist constitution. The other major player in the region, India, forms QUAD with the US, Japan and Australia, but its insistence on ‘strategic autonomy’ while keeping independent ties with Russia and also resisting a more militaristic colour to this union has prevented QUAD from achieving strategic coherence and utility against formidable Chinese intransigence.
As a part of the larger trend of transitioning beyond traditional foreign policy tools, the Indo-Pacific has been the incubator of minilateral associations as the site of hot strategic competition. The growing intersection of economic, military, political, and cultural conflicts within and outside the region’s states has been a shot in the arm for such rebalancing strategies. Initiatives like QUAD, US-Republic of Korea-Japan Trilateral, AUKUS, and SQUAD, all grapple with traditional and non-traditional currencies of power politics. Both China and the US are spearheading activist diplomatic regimens to woo countries to broaden their network of friendly and cooperative states. Whether to funnel strategic rivalry by perusing ‘hard’ politics or pursue ‘human security’ and ‘soft’ issues (Singapore-Indonesia-Malaysia Malacca Straits Patrol) – minilateral initiatives in Indo-Pacific are blurring boundaries in strategic wargaming.
QUAD to SQUAD à a mere strategic dribble or a concrete gameplan?
Chinese commentators have seen SQUAD as a part of the declining hegemon’s (US) last-ditch attempt to ‘contain’ an inevitable Chinese ascendancy. The Dragon has accused the US of fielding proxies like the Philippines to provoke its “Ukrainization”. They claim that the United States is manipulating the Philippines and provoking it against China. This ‘cold war mentality’ will entrench regional divisions and mistrust, complicating the security atmosphere even more. This will force states to take sides and pose challenges to cooperation between China and Southeast Asian countries. This point is of relevance as China-ASEAN trade has increased four times since 2019. Furthermore, the Regional Comprehensive Partnership (RCEP) backed by China has been touted as the world’s biggest security pact by Al Jazeera, covering 30% of the global population and economy. This raises doubts about the efficacy of the strategic alignment of US-led groups with SCS littoral states.
But the era of simplistic geopolitical games is over as the age of alliances has eclipsed countries, especially from the Global South, valuing the strategic depth accruing from issue-based ad hoc coalitions. As Kissinger famously opined that ‘America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests’ – this maxim underscores the need for adaptation to constantly changing geopolitical alignments. SQUAD is a much more focused attempt than QUAD to build pressure on China to temper its predatory attitude in SCS, especially the Taiwan Straits. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has already reasoned in the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022, that QUAD is not Asian NATO and simply about “four countries who have common interests, common values, (a) great deal of comfort, who happen to be located in the four corners of the Indo Pacific”. This counterbalance will perhaps be much more effective with replacement of a reluctant India with Philippines, an ally of United States, having a Visiting Forces Agreement with Australia and negotiating Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan.
SQUAD, by aiming for greater military interoperability and strategic coordination, is a step forward from QUAD. Aiming to strengthen the joint response to a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional threats, SQUAD is a part of the “lattice-like” security architecture that the US has been cultivating in recent years. Moving away from an unpopular, costly and strategically dubious collective defence posture for sustaining a favourable balance of power, the United States, as the preeminent power, is now seeking mutual plurilateral partnerships. The greater shift from grand alliances to minilaterals underscores the need to counter a limited but imminent spectrum of threats in flexible and improvised groupings.
Informalism in Indo-Pacific diplomacy
With its roots in off-the-table diplomatic manoeuvres, the SQUAD needs to institutionalise and promise actionable partnership through regular punitive and preventive joint patrols in the South China Sea and across the Pacific, coordinated intelligence-sharing and maritime security cooperation, and modernisation and interoperability of partners’ defence systems. It needs to score a bullseye in its counter plans to Chinese aggression and hybrid grey zone warfare, which have seriously jeopardised regional security and cooperation. China smartly nibbles at others’ territory by playing the victim and enmeshing its target in disadvantageous bilateral negotiations, but with mechanisms like ASEAN and QUAD, South East Asian states can proffer a multilateral response to the Dragon’s increasingly threatening behaviour. Such institutionalised cooperative platforms signal to China that its targets are not alone and that it can be subjected to military and economic countermeasures.
However, there are problems with this interpretation of SQUAD for two reasons. First, SQUAD is not Asian NATO – an idea dumped by all relevant stakeholders but one that irks China. A collective defence system in South East Asia is not even a remote possibility because even if China is recognised as a common threat – the perception of the nature of its irredentism differs between Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and others. Furthermore, despite China’s economic coercion by weaponising its supply chain dominance, surveillance infiltration, and trade dumping – South East Asian states are so deeply integrated and have benefitted from RCEP and bilateral arrangements with China that they will ponder twice before directly standing up to it. It is a chicken and egg situation of whether to float a militarised forum to respond to already prominent Chinese abrasions while also risking an enraged China.
Deep Chinese pockets have successfully orchestrated its ‘dual circulation’ strategy in which its manufacturing exports-driven economy earns foreign exchange by becoming the factory of the world and also caters to booming domestic demand. This has been aided by piloting gargantuan projects, massive in imagination and investments, all across the world to capture the markets and minds of the larger world, especially the Global South. Initiatives like the Global Civilisation Initiative are part of China’s attempt to replace the cultural industry of American hegemony and replace it with its own. It remains to be seen if SQUAD can provide real deterrence beyond the reputational deterrence of standing against a ‘quartet of chaos’ of autocracies.
Way Forward
An assessment of Chinese strategic culture is aptly summed by recalling an observation of its founding father, Mao Zedong, that power flows from the barrel of a gun. All revisionist powers like China are hardwired to maniacally try to bridge their strategic insecurities in the balance with the current superpower. Military capabilities and economic resourcefulness are the two rules of the game, with its theatre, the Indo-Pacific, transforming into a textbook case of Mandala dynamics. India already has its playbook astutely described by master strategician Kautilya. Guided by new age wisdom of eschewing war by pursuing ‘dialogue and diplomacy’, India has done well to shun the militaristic avatar of QUAD and by refusing to play the Western proxy. By retaining its value as an autonomous swing state, India has preserved sufficient systemic space for a cold war between the ‘Alliance of Democracies’ and ‘Eurasian Entente’ to cement.
China, meanwhile, has been pursuing its own brand of ‘value-based’ minilateralism against the ‘cold war mentality’ of block politics. It insists on a Global South and Asian solidarity against the erstwhile colonial and imperialist powers. It poses a ‘common future for mankind’ under the benign Chinese umbrella. This is a reproduction of the 1990s talk shop of ‘Peaceful Rise’ where Beijing successfully managed to use multilateral arrangements of liberal internationalism like WTO to their full potential to be the indisputable challenger state to the US. As is the fundamental tenet under Hegemonic Stability Theory, a rising power invariably faces off with the current one. China’s claim to power has been to promote ‘common prosperity’, and yet its actions within and outside its borders suggest otherwise.
As for SQUAD itself, someone has to stand up and build resilience and guarantee mutuality in acknowledging and addressing a common strategic irritant. Chinese mouthpiece Global Times has regularly lambasted the idea of Asian NATO, but China itself is pushing South East Asia into a Western embrace by failing to honour international laws. It refused to accept the 2015 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration on the South China Sea dispute and recently scuttled an attempt by ASEAN to have a voluntary code of conduct for non-confrontational and non-interventionist open and free navigation. It has turned SCS and the broader Indo-Pacific into a playground for great power showdown. On the contrary, the continuous intrusion of the United States, an extra-regional alien power, in Asian subregions has delegitimised existing regional security architectures like ASEAN, East Asia Summit and even SAARC to reproduce dependencies of client states on superpowers. Such western interventions have precluded the natural emergence of an autonomous regional balance of power within Asia and raked up insecurities for Russia and China.
The spectrum of offensive tactics followed by China just manages to remain actions short of provoking a full-scale war – but it should be mindful that this rapidly changing, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world poses newer definitions and strategic thresholds. Unlike conventional war, the escalation ladder in grey zone kinetic warfare (as implemented by China) does not have a clear chain. All modern wars are wars of attrition, with even so-called major powers being embarrassed into the ‘Afghanistan Trap’ of never-ending conflicts with smaller and ‘insignificant’ states. China’s possible future misadventure in Taiwan can learn lessons from Iraq (US) and Ukraine (Russia).
In Senkakau Paradox, Michael E. O’Hanlon poses the danger of small states acquiring magnified and bloated perceptions in the balance of power politics and provoking war – a similar danger is faced in the South China Sea where small (and some artificial islands) risk igniting this region. In contrast, he proposes an ‘integrated defence’ of a mix of mild military reprisals and economic sanctions to deter the threat actors. Such measures are already in place – Mineral Security Partnership, IPEF, iCET etc. However, the deployment of geoeconomic tools is a dicey proposition as it can further push the adversary into evolving alternative and independent architectures like the proposed BRICS currency against the weaponisation of SWIFT and sanctions regimes by Euro-Atlantic countries.
An opposite reading would suggest that small states have very often been ignored and trampled in the interstate system. In the Indo-Pacific itself, the Pacific Islands are mentioned as an afterthought, and their existential concerns of being drowned by rising sea levels due to climate change are dismissed as ‘low politics’ matters. The superpowers only remember them for their strategic locales while eyeing their rich mineral resources. Indo-Pacific remains a unique stage of enactment of geopolitical rivalries as non-state actors are not major players, unlike in the Gulf, where Houthis have wreaked havoc. In this sense, traditional IR models of statism and power politics still seem to apply and offer prescriptive models for Asian hawks and doves.
