How to sustain the Quad amidst a geopolitical churn

The Quad meeting holds added importance at a time when the US, embroiled in the Russia-Ukraine war and more directly in the Iran-Israel war, is seen to be losing its strategic focus to counteract China's assertive rise in the Indo-Pacific region.

- MONISH TOURANGBAM

Multilateral and minilateral groupings of all hues and designs are in their most heightened phase of transition and transformation, recalibrating and readjusting to the seismic shifts in global affairs. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) stands at a critical phase of churning in the Indo-Pacific region, where America's commitments are being questioned and China is trying to woo its neighbours by offering economic incentives.

Even as the Trump team negotiates a new trade arrangement with China, the Quad foreign ministers met in Washington D.C. and called out China's coercive activities in the South and East China Seas, and established new understandings on critical minerals, to counteract China's domination over mineral resources that are inevitable for future defense and commercial technologies.

India's Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar met his counterparts, and released a joint statement, preparing grounds for the upcoming Quad Leaders' Summit to be hosted by India later this year.

The Quad meeting holds added importance at a time when the US, embroiled in the Russia-Ukraine war and more directly in the Iran-Israel war, is seen to be losing its strategic focus to counteract China's assertive rise in the Indo-Pacific region.

Successive US presidencies, Republican and Democrat, have identified the Indo-Pacific region as the region of priority in the US strategic calculus, but US global commitments and its domestic politics often remind Washington of the trials and tribulations of being a global power.

At least since the end of World War II, the United States has shown both the capability and the intention to shape the international system in its own favor. But history is witness to the fact that not even a global power like the US is completely successful in maintaining its writ over global affairs and geopolitics that are beyond its own control and sometimes of its making.