ET Analysis: Joe Biden makes his China call, accords primacy to Indo-Pacific

The most significant underlying message emerging from the first formal Quad summit on Friday was the silent assertion of new US President Joe Biden’s strategic priorities, which clearly lay out the contours of the rivalries that are likely to shape global political and economic discourse over the next few decades if not more.

By making the Quad summit the first plurilateral meeting he hosted in his presidency, Biden has sent out three clear messages which put to rest, at least for now, all the speculation on which direction Washington would lean in framing its new approach. The Biden administration, it must be said, has responded with not just clarity but also intent, which has taken even those betting on a Europe-centric approach by surprise.

The first underlying message coming out of the summit is that the new US administration has placed China above Russia in framing its principal competitor, challenger and adversary. This is important because in the Trump years, the democrats always seemed to give primacy to Russia. In fact, the CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act) was piloted by the democrats to largely expand punitive measures against Russia.

While it would be wholly incorrect to state that the Russia issue is anyway less significant to the United States, what’s emerged is a strategic appreciation that China is now America’s principal challenger and potential threat that needs to be countered both in the short and the long-term. This is now officially a bipartisan view. And from an Indian standpoint, it’s also now an equally bipartisan view that India is both an important lynchpin as well as a key frontier in this new contest which spans across a myriad of old and new areas, from the possibility of conventional military conflict to the fight over shaping the future of digital technology — all is on the table.

The second important message, which has taken a few by surprise, is that the Biden administration has accorded primacy to the Indo-Pacific over Europe. It was always believed, given some of Biden’s own statements during the campaign, that the first effort of the new administration would be to rebuild bridges with Europe and undo the damage former President Donald Trump had done to this relationship.

Again, that objective has not diminished but the Indo-Pacific has got priority. Possibly the fact that European Union went ahead with the China trade deal ignoring requests from the Biden team, which was working through a difficult transition period with Trump, served as a rude reminder of the power Beijing could wield on EU countries.

The third underlying message, which is closely linked to the second, is prioritisation the US has given to working with India, Japan and Australia on the military front than NATO. Again, it’s not as if NATO has reduced salience in Washington now, but it’s clear to Washington that the counter to China will have to be from the Indo-Pacific and for that, strengthening military partnership with these countries is vital. The quality of military and technical cooperation between India and the US during the nine-month India-China standoff is already being seen as a way forward.

All said, it’s still early days for the Quad but two of the four partners also have big and immediate economic stakes in this arrangement. India and the US are the two Quad countries with no all-encompassing trading arrangement in the region. Japan and Australia have signed up to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) while the earlier US plan for a Trans Pacific Partnership has fallen off the radar.

In this context, it’s quite possible that India and the US will push for deeper economic engagement with an intent to create credible alternative critical supply chain initiatives beyond just the Covid-19 vaccine.

So, given this entire backdrop, what happened on Friday can be termed the first roll of the dice but a more accurate description would be that it was the first structured conversation at the highest level, followed by concrete outcomes, which has left no one in doubt on the strategic choices the new US administration has made.

A review of Quad conversations in the last decade will show that none of the partners ever wanted to make this a formal arrangement, precisely not to provoke China. The idea was always to ensure the ‘peaceful rise of China’. Beijing’s calculations were different and in the bargain it has counter-provoked the Quad powers to coalesce on principles that eminently seek to keep China in check.