Who killed the quad?
Kevin Rudd goes to Beijing, and Australia tries to mollify Japan, confusion lingers about whether Australia helped China bury a forum of Asia-Pacific democracies.
A so-called quadrilateral dialogue among officials from the United States, Japan, Australia and India was held last year, much to China's concern. The new Australian Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, has announced that Australia 'would not be proposing' a second round.
These were carefully qualified words. But they have fuelled suspicions, especially in the excitable Indian media, that Australia is 'tilting' in favour of China. Such reports have made much of the fact that Mr Smith volunteered his remarks while in a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart. The theory is that Australia's 'withdrawal' from the quad will compound tensions in Australia-India relations arising from the Rudd Government's decision not to sell uranium to India.
In fact, a strong Australia-India relationship is entirely salvageable, if Mr Rudd moves soon to put weight behind his Government's rhetoric of making India a priority.
In any case, the notion that Australia killed the quad is just one of many myths about that mysterious forum, its origins, disappearance and the question of whether it has a future.
Certainly China was worried when it perceived an emerging democratic axis. Many commentators in the region judged the quad to be the embryo of a NATO-like alliance to contain Chinese power. They either condemned it as mad, bad and dangerous or praised it as a bold act of strategic balancing.
The truth was less dramatic. The quad was more phantom than menace.
'Minilateralism'Its origins were many. One was naval cooperation among the US, Japan, India and Australia in responding to the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This enthused the four capitals about working together on other transnational problems.
They saw little joy in unwieldy region-wide security structures. Instead the trend was a 'minilateralism' of little groups: the Six Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear program; the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation led by China and Russia in Central Asia; and the trilateral dialogue among the US and its allies Japan and Australia.
Meanwhile in Washington, the idea that democracies work best with democracies was gathering steam. Think tanks promoted a world order based on a 'concert of democracies'.
Then came a push by a new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to arrest Japan's eclipse by China. He saw India and Australia as the extra security partners Japan needed, and called for 'values-oriented diplomacy', an 'arc of freedom and prosperity' and a new four-country forum.
Canberra, Washington and New Delhi responded coolly, even if some voices, notably Vice President Cheney, were enthusiastic. A tentative first meeting was held on the margins of a regional forum in Manila last May: four officials, no formal agenda, and no red-flag word like 'security' in its title.
Even this was too much for Beijing. It issued diplomatic protests demanding to know what the talks were about. This may have increased New Delhi's interest in the new forum: a few months later, India held a naval exercise involving the four quad countries plus Singapore.
Yet just as these war games were about to add to Chinese fears of a four-way alliance, those concerns dissipated with Abe's sudden resignation. His replacement, Yasuo Fukuda, was not interested in the quad. The forum went dormant. Nobody suggested reviving it. Thus Australia's subsequent public rejection of the quad was needless. But nor would it have shocked or insulted Japan.
Side effectsThe rise and fall of the quad was a generally unsettling episode in Asian diplomacy.
Still, its side effects were not all bad. It raised awareness of the need for collaboration among countries willing to respond to regional security problems, while confirming that such ventures will be more sustainable if based on convergent interests and the ability to contribute rather than on shared values. In that sense, the apparent failure of the quadrilateral experiment may have invigorated recent US efforts (which Mr Rudd applauds) to turn the ideologically-diverse Korean Six Party Talks into a permanent forum for a wider range of issues.
At the same time, the quadrilateral may still have a flicker of life. John McCain has promised to pursue it if he becomes president. And the idea of democracies consulting democracies is unlikely to be confined to the Republican camp.
Meanwhile,
the navies of the US, India, Japan and Australia are co-operating ever more closely, in twos and three if not strictly as a foursome. Perhaps it will prove prudent of Mr Smith to have qualified his repudiation of the quad after all.
Rory Medcalf directs the international security program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.
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