This Weekend’s Leaders Summit Brings Prospects for a More Sustainable and Useful Quad

On Saturday, September 21st, President Biden will host the fourth annual Quad Leaders Summit in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. The prime ministers of the three other Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or “Quad” countries—Australia, India, and Japan—have all confirmed their attendance at the gathering. This year’s Leaders Summit is emblematic of two facts: that the Quad grouping has been steadily building strength through both the pace and structure of its meetings, and that it is making serious efforts to pivot from its anti-China reputation. In the long run, both are essential to the Quad’s sustainability and longevity.

The Quad grouping formed when four countries—Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—came together in the wake of the humanitarian disaster left by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Their goal was to provide disaster relief. By 2007, the year of the first Quad summit, the group had decided to expand beyond humanitarian aid cooperation to include other issue areas in the maritime domain. Binding them together was a shared consensus that the Indo-Pacific was a free and open space, taking shape at the “confluence of the two seas,” as the late Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo declared in an address that year to the Indian Parliament. What was left unstated but understood was that China had been encroaching on the free and open Indo-Pacific and violating international maritime norms. Despite its members’ mutual concerns about China and their commitment to the idea of the Indo-Pacific as a single and  shared strategic space, Quad cooperation did not grow at a steady pace. A large reason for this was the countries’ differing approaches to China: India, with reportedly 100,000 Chinese troops at its border, was reluctant to commit fully to any grouping seen as explicitly working to contain China, while Australia, too, was not keen to be seen taking a blatantly anti-China stance. 

But in 2017, the Quad was resurrected, brought together again by the worries of its member states about China’s growing influence and encroachment in the Indo-Pacific. This time around, the Quad laid out an agenda that would move beyond traditional security concerns and include issues broadly of interest to not just its members but also other Asian countries, such as development and counterterrorism. The 2020 pandemic gave the Quad another jolt. China’s vaccine diplomacy deeply worried the Quad countries, and health—in particular, the delivery of 1.2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines—became a Quad goal. But these efforts largely failed. One reason for this was structural setbacks. Biological-E (Bio-E), the Indian pharmaceutical company designated to manufacture one billion vaccine doses through a Quad investment of $50 million, had scaled up and produced the doses. But delivery was more difficult due to unforeseen issues, such as vaccine hesitancy and concerns regarding Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine. Only India actually ended up donating vaccines under the Quad umbrella; the other Quad countries did so through bilateral arrangements. Another, possibly more fundamental reason was that even though the issue at stake was ostensibly health cooperation during a pandemic, the urgency of these efforts had originally been spurred by the desire to counter China. Consequently, this cooperation was piecemeal and not well-considered.

Since 2004, the Quad seems to have learned a few lessons. The first is that the group has stopped its pattern of meeting in fits and starts. A solid foundation now seems to be in place: In the past four years alone, there have been six in-person meetings at the leader level, as well as eight foreign ministerial meetings. Second, the Quad has been expanding vertically and horizontally. A new Quad Fellowship initiative aims to bring together individual talent from not only the Quad countries but also Southeast Asian countries. Finally, the Quad, and particularly this weekend’s Leaders Summit, has been emphasizing issues that have the potential for cooperation not just with Quad-friendly nations but even China. Climate, for example, is on the agenda. More importantly, one of President Biden’s key initiatives—his Cancer Moonshot program—will be an issue for Quad collaboration. In particular, the goal of such cooperation will be to reduce cases of cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific, given that cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer amongst women in the world and many island nations have high rates of the disease. Biden administration officials told the New York Times that the hope is for India to make and distribute the vaccines, for Japan to provide the technological infrastructure, and for U.S. navy ships to deliver the vaccines to remote countries.

While the Quad will certainly continue to focus on military cooperation, including via joint exercises and intelligence sharing, it is unlikely to ever become a military alliance. For one, India is notoriously independent in its foreign policy, and a commitment to the Indo-Pacific without India, the only Quad member in the Indian Ocean, would ring hollow. Thus, the grouping’s success will also depend, in large part, on its capacity to cooperate and deliver goods in the Indo-Pacific. Furthermore, the group’s efforts here must be seen as being independent of its desire to counter China: Many smaller countries in the Indo-Pacific are acutely sensitive to the perils of being seen as taking sides between the Quad and China and regional groupings like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are wary of being pressured or sidelined by either side. Though the Quad has come a long way in the 20 years since its inception, this summit could be one more step in building a sustainable structure that is seen as both useful and welcome in the Indo-Pacific.