| Australia & India have shared interests, values and promoting a secure, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific. Listen to the Podcast Diaspora Episode on why Quad with India & Australia perspective is vital. After a long hiatus, the Australia-India-Japan-US Security Quadrilateral Dialogue — informally known as the Quad — was resurrected in 2017 to support a ‘free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific Region’. While there are important differences among the four countries on threat perceptions, military capability, strategic priority, capacity to bear the costs of potential retaliation, strategic culture, and constitutional imperatives, these differences place limitations on Quadrilateral cooperation but do not preclude it. All four countries have common interests in maintaining a stable balance of power in the region, freedom of the seas, an open rules-based economic order, to counter debt-trap diplomacy, and limiting the use of coercion by a state to assert territorial claims. Despite the COVID-19 shock and the domestic upheavals and distractions it poses, this cooperation will continue to deepen. Assessing the prospects for the Quad starts with the common interests that have drawn the four countries together. These can be grouped into geostrategic interests, geoeconomic interests, and those concerning the nature of the international order. First, all four nations share a deep interest in maintaining a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific and preventing a regional state from becoming dominant. Such a state would have the capacity to establish a sphere of influence in the region, to construct rules that favor its interests at the expense of smaller states, and to exclude or limit geographic, economic, and political access to countries outside the region. All four states are committed to the current rules-based economic order in the Indo-Pacific. This is based on free trade, open investment environments, open competitive tendering, the rule of law, and standards of good governance from which all continue to benefit. Hence, if the Quad is to push its weight in the region, it has to have a strong economic element built within it. The webinar will highlight the importance of Quad and the role India & Australia will play in achieving further the objectives and discuss the way forward for future with like-minded partners. To RSVP for the event, please register here. |
