Chinese Actions Awaken 'The Quad': A Four-Country Indo-Pacific Grouping

The Economist magazine recently reported that when the United States, Australia, India, and Japan met in 2007 for a quadrilateral dialogue on security matters, many bet that the new grouping would “fizzle.” The magazine noted that once non-aligned India, was “still suspicious of anything that smacked of an alliance.” But defense ties among the four nations are now rapidly strengthening.

They’d been dormant for a while up until mid-June of this year when a Chinese border patrol attacked Indian soldiers along the lengthy and badly demarcated China-India border in India’s Ladakh region. At least 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese were killed. China refrained from providing any details of its losses. “This episode helped in no small part to galvanize greater effort among the four QUAD countries to come together, said Collin Koh Swee Lean, a strategic analyst based in Singapore. «The most telling was India’s invitation to re-join Exercise Malabar after a hiatus since 2007,” Koh said in an email answer to questions from this commentator.

According to Koh, India had been regarded for a while as “the weakest link” within the Quad because of its desire not to provoke China.

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