Quad foreign ministers meet in Melbourne
Targeting China, Russia only serves US strategic demand: expert
The tone of the 4th Quad foreign ministers’ meeting scheduled for Friday in Australia will be based on the principle of democracy around ideological Commonalities and cooperation. US and Australian officials have stressed that the meeting will discuss the “challenges” posed to democracy and rules-based international order.
US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel J. Kritenbrink and Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne made remarks to the media that the upcoming Quad meeting will discuss the “challenges” that China posed to them.
Kritenbrink said at a briefing on February 4 ahead of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Australia that the discussion of the top diplomats from four Quad members “will relate to the challenges that China poses” to their shared “values” and “rules-based order” in a number of sectors.
Similarly, Payne The Australian minister said in an interview with ABC on Wednesday that “The approach of authoritarian regimes,” naming Russia, China and North Korea, “are not contributing to security. They are not contributing to stability.” She said China and Russia’s “vision of the global order is completely at odds with the vision that Australia has and our allies and our partners have.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry however criticized Such utterances and retorted that the US image of democracy has already collapsed, and using democratic values to form cliques for confrontation is a “betrayal of democracy.” Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the remarks at a routine press conference on Wednesday, saying that “democracy is a common value shared by humanity, rather than a patent owned by a few countries.”
For the “rules-based order,” Zhao said China, just like most countries around the world, acknowledges and upholds the international system with the United Nations at its core, and international order based on international laws, rather than a “rules-based order” unilaterally defined by one or a few countries. Emphasizing democracy or ideological elements is just an attempt to justify and beautify the Quad mechanism, to make it look more legitimate. But in fact, the Quad is driven by US strategic demand, which fabricates fears over China and Russia that the US uses to scare its allies. It’s never been driven by democracy.
Now coming to reality, India and Japan are with US and Australia together in the QUAD. They are going to have talks for what they want to get from each other. This will help in formalizing a working mechanism to remove obstacles and for enacting concrete cooperation.
The are indeed contradictions in QUAD. The USA and Australia may be WISHING to have it as a military bloc to oppose China and Russia too in the Indo Pacific region. However India and Japan oppose this idea vigorously and will just walk away if USA tries to coerce them in any manner whatsoever. No power possesses the ability to coerce India.
In fact unlike India and Japan, it is Australia which is different from other Quad members, as it has neither sovereignty disputes nor strategic competition with China. So actually speaking, it should not be insisting that QUAD should be a military bloc.
Though most surprisingly, it is Australia that has cut off official communication channels with China due to its diehard anti-China policy, while the US, Japan and India all maintain dialogues with Beijing despite the divergences they have with China.
Also ironically, the US even benefited from the worsening China-Australia ties, as US wines have taken a big bite out of the share of Australian wines in the Chinese market.
India naturally has its own expectations from the Quad. As a country it has refused to join any military bloc since independence in 1947. India has followed its own Non Aligned Policy even when it had no military might and today it is a rising World Power. According to Indian media, the Ministry of External Affairs of India said the four foreign ministers “will review ongoing Quad cooperation and build on the positive and constructive agenda… to address contemporary challenges such as the COVID pandemic, supply chains, critical technologies [and] climate change.”
India now has recovered from a bad COVID-19 epidemic situation with very little scar compared to rest of the World. Now once again New Delhi is Concentrating on its economy which is already the fasted growing in the whole world. It is certainly not concentrating on China. Both New Delhi and Beijing have clarified on multiple occasions that they have no intention to compete with each other. Only hitch is the continuing occupation by China of Indian territory in Ladakh. Once the Indo Tibetan boundary and Tibet China boundary are negotiated and marked on ground, then things will return to normal.
So at QUAD India will prefer to stress issues like fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains and climate change. Also India is a very friend of Russia. It will refuse criticize Russia in any manner.
The US may even be planning to make a “Quad plus” to include countries like South Korea and Vietnam, although this may turn out to be quite difficult. Just like India and Japan, on one hand, these countries may have relationship with the US f but will also continue to keep engagements and exchanges with China on the other hand. They won’t be willing to serve as a tool for any one against China or Russia. They will handle the complicated relations with China and the US based on their own wisdom.
