The Quad and its transmute: Coordinated cooperation, convergent coalition, capacitive compact

Abstract

The constellation of liberal democracies situated across extended coordinates straddling the Indo-Pacific expanse, have convened in a manner that constitutes a mechanism, in fascinating organic evolution. Emanating from the inadvertence of adversity, steeped in cooperative functioning of respective navies, dispensing ameliorative succour and sustenance to marooned populaces lacerated by the 2004 tsunami; to the more recent diplomatically cultivated coalition, emphasizing and prioritizing 'good order at sea' in normative militating statecraft; through to the most recent echelon political commitment for synergised partnership at strategic capacitation; it's the salutary and seminal progression of a construct, in pluralised beneficence. Security and growth are universalised strategic considerations; impulses, secularly at work, across preponderantly-ensconced, ascendant-rising, and glacially-emerging sovereign trajectories, alike. Yet, the environ of searing US-China geostrategic competition, forged amidst intensified strategic-enmeshing, within complexly-interdependent regional orders and the overarching global milieu, is mandating the crafting of axes of aggregation, viz., the contrived conjoin of Indian and Pacific ocean vectors into a composite, and disaggregation, i.e., the specific subset collectivisation of the quartet of sovereigns, in pursuance of navigating the angularities that stem from inevitable juxtaposition and twining, in same vein. It behoves sobering assessment that, the Quad concert of resident and extra-territorial Indo-Pacific states are grappling with the geopolitical quandaries and geo-economic dilemmas procreated by China's formidable hegemonic rise and predatory dimensions of its burgeoning comprehensive national power. However, the dint of the Middle Kingdom's initial hubristic derision of the Quad, as "sea-foam" destined for swift dissipation, mutating to whining refrain, that it represents a "small circle of group politics promoting selective multilateralism", speaks as much to the potential traction of the quadrangular-setting's elicit and exude, as to the rich ironies of Beijing's averment.(Krishnan, 2021) There is little gainsaying that conceptualisation of the Indo-Pacific is no longer up for contention, viewed in the construct's pervasive embrace, not just by Quad sovereigns (US, Japan, India and Australia), but increasingly, by out-of-sphere protagonists, inhabiting the broad-sweep Euro-Atlantic spaces. Articulated strategic calculus engages in conversational dissemble, through the masquerade of veritable intentions of counteracting if not out-rightly containing China, by disingenuously suggesting that, the strategic appraisal and appreciation of the Indo-Pacific expanse, is neither China-centric, nor arrayed and ranged against it; to the obvious vexations of Beijing. Since its WTO accession, strategic preoccupations have coalesced around managing the unfolding rise of the mercantilist behemoth, which, during the last decadal epoch, has morphed into managing terms of engagement, with an arguably pre-eminent great-power contender.