US shifting focus back to Indo-Pacific

Manoj Joshi

Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

THE leaders of the Quadrilateral Dialogue, aka Quad, meet in an in-person summit in Tokyo today. An important aim is to show the world that events in Ukraine will not be allowed to shift the focus away from the Indo-Pacific. But the bonhomie will barely hide the fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has, indeed, impacted not just Europe, but Indo-Pacific security as well.

This time around, the US is using the Quad summit to flesh out its Indo-Pacific economic & social agenda.

The US and India are also using the Quad summit to shore up their bilateral ties in North-east Asia. President Joe Biden reached Tokyo after a bilateral visit to South Korea, PM Narendra Modi arrived on Monday, a day before the summit to engage his Japanese counterparts in official bilateral discussions.

As of now, the Quad’s formal agenda is modest. It remains a platform for leaders of the four countries to meet each other collectively and bilaterally. Meetings have so far taken up the issue of providing vaccines, building supply chains and working together in the area of critical technologies, mitigating climate change and providing humanitarian relief. An unstated aspect of the Quad grouping is supply-chain resilience and the need to have a chain which is not linked to China. Importantly, this time around, the US is using the summit to flesh out its Indo-Pacific economic and social agenda through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), which was launched on Monday.

The Quad’s security mandate is to constrain the rise of China, though it remains coy about saying so openly. It insists that it is not targeting any third country. That is not taken seriously by Beijing which uses every opportunity to attack the Quad and its meetings. Formal military ties within the Quad are trilateral (AUKUS) or bilateral (US-Japan, US-Australia), but there is a security cooperation, say, between US and India, or India and Japan and Australia. Then there is the Malabar naval exercise which now features all four members of the Quad.

By his trip to Asia Biden seems to be wanting to shift the American focus back to the Indo-Pacific. Yet, there should be no doubt that the attention of the US has been wrenched away to Ukraine. The US is spending a huge amount of money (some $54 billion by the last count), as well as effort to supply the beleaguered country with military assistance.

By way of comparison, the Indo-Pacific project is getting lesser time and resources. The recent US-ASEAN summit in Washington earlier this month sought to underscore the centrality of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific scheme of things. But the US monetary commitments have been modest. With the ASEAN they announced $150 million in initiatives in infrastructure, security, pandemic preparedness and clean energy which are expected to mobilise billions of dollars of private financing. All said, actual results from these initiatives remain to be seen in the future.

Most countries in the region have signed up for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which came into force on January 1. The ASEAN, Japan and South Korea have been frustrated by the US inability to step up economic engagement ever since the then US President Trump walked out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017. American policy in the Indo-Pacific, said a critic, was “all guns and no butter.”

The Biden Administration shows no signs of taking up the challenge. It has stayed out of the CPTPP. And now it has launched the IPEF, projected as a flexible programme with four pillars to tackle issues such as infrastructure, supply chain resilience, clean energy and digital trade. India is on the list of 13 countries that have signed up for the IPEF. Along with the US, it has the distinction of being neither with the CPTPP nor the RCEP. Just how the IPEF will work remains to be seen. But it will clearly not provide the expanded market access or tariff concessions for its participants as the FTAs do.

On the security front, the Quad is confronted with a whole new situation with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Almost immediately, it raised concerns over the possibility of a similar Chinese move on Taiwan. In early March, for the first time, the US and UK held talks on cooperating to reduce the chances of a war with China over Taiwan.

Earlier this month in London, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that the invasion of Ukraine could be replicated in Taiwan by China. He said that such a move would threaten Japan’s survival and international security. More recently US Joint Chiefs of Staff chief Gen Mark Miley declared that China planned to invade Taiwan by 2027.

One consequence of these developments is that the Japanese have now committed to double their defence budget and reach the ‘NATO-standard’ 2 per cent of their GDP. Given the size of the Japanese economy this will have significant consequences. It will overtake India to be the third highest military spender in the world.

The rising salience of the Taiwan issue suggests that New Delhi needs to carefully think its way through the security dimension of the Quad. While there is need to step up interaction with Taipei, India is certainly not ready to play the kind of role other Quad members like Japan, the US and Australia are expected to play in the event of a crisis.

As it is, on the burning issue of the day — the Russian invasion of Ukraine — the Quad is not quite united. Even though its three partners have not made it an issue, India’s Russia-leaning neutrality does raise questions about the cohesion of the enterprise.

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