Looking back at the history of the Quad, the four Indo-Pacific democracies came together to lead humanitarian relief operations following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Later, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave a new face to the grouping by promoting the idea of the “Indo-Pacific”, starting with his famous “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech at the Indian Parliament in 2007. Earlier in the same year, the first Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) was held on the sidelines of the ASEAN and its related summits in Manila.
With Canberra backing off under Chinese pressure and with unfavourable regime changes in Australia and Japan in 2007, the Quad remained in a dormant state for about a decade until it was given a new life in November 2017, when the Trump Administration in the United States took a special interest in reviving it. It was followed by four working-level meetings involving senior diplomatic officials from the four countries between 2017 and 2019. And, the first Quad ministerial was held in September 2019 on the sidelines of that year’s United Nations General Assembly’s annual session in New York. It was followed by meetings in Tokyo (2020), Melbourne (2022) and again in New York (2022), while in 2021 the meeting was held in virtual mode.
The grouping was upgraded to the summit-level in March 2021, when the heads of government of the four countries met in virtual mode, and later in the same year U.S. President Joe Biden hosted the prime ministers of India, Japan and Australia at the White House for the first in-person Quad summit. Tokyo was the venue for the following year’s summit. The Quad has indeed come a long way from when it was conceived to where it has reached today, with its ambit of cooperation spreading across different areas, ranging from the earliest area of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to academic cooperation, Covid vaccine distribution, infrastructure, cybersecurity and emerging technologies.
Read: CIA’s Supremacy in Global Spy Ring and Hammering Russian Intelligence Since Cold War
Last year’s Tokyo summit saw the launch of the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), a decisive step to deepen engagement with regional partners through information-sharing, capacity-building and technical assistance, including countering illegal fishing. The initiative was aimed at bringing in emerging technologies and promoting innovation to build a faster, wider and accurate maritime picture of real-time activities in the crucial sub-regions of the Indo-Pacific. Like IPMDA, the forthcoming summit in Sydney could be a game changer.
Bejoy Sebastian is a Teaching Assistant at FLAME University, Pune, India. He writes on India-China relations, Chinese foreign policy and the broader geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific region. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, and holds an MA in International Relations from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India.