{"id":3355,"date":"2019-06-05T20:19:40","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T14:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/?p=3355"},"modified":"2019-06-05T20:28:40","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T14:58:40","slug":"quad-countries-to-focus-on-maritime-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/quad-countries-to-focus-on-maritime-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Quad countries to focus on maritime security"},"content":{"rendered":"

Relevant for prelims and GS paper 2(IR):-<\/strong><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON\/HONOLULU: The \u201cQuad\u201d countries, namely India, US, Japan and Australia, will hold their next meeting on the sidelines of the 13th<\/p>\n

East Asia Summit\u00a0at\u00a0Singapore\u00a0in mid-November, with the grouping keen to step-up maritime security and disaster relief initiatives as well as economic development projects in the critical Indo-Pacific region.
\nThe US believes the\u00a0Quad, as one of the elements of its larger Indo-Pacific strategy for \u201ca free, open and rules-based order\u201d in face of an aggressive and expansionist China in the region, should eventually evolve into a ministerial-level dialogue imbued with a strong military dimension.<\/p>\n

But Washington also recognizes that New Delhi for now remains opposed to any militarization of the Quad, which was revived after a decade as a joint secretary-level dialogue in November 2017, with its second meeting being held in June this year. India has also made it clear that the US should not \u201cconflate\u201d the Indo-Pacific with the Quad, stressing the centrality of Asean in the former.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuad is an opportunity for like-minded countries to share notes and collaborate on projects of mutual interest. All four countries share a vision of an open and free Indo-Pacific. Each is involved in development and economic projects as well as in promoting maritime domain awareness and maritime security,\u201d senior state department official Alice G Wells told TOI.
\n\u201cThe Indo-Pacific strategy recognizes the centrality of Asean and APAC (Asia-Pacific region). This kind of grouping (Quad) is not in any way an effort to bypass these critical institutional bulwarks in the Indo-Pacific,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

While \u201cnot ruling out\u201d a military dimension in the Quad \u201cin the future\u201d, she stressed the present focus was on economic development and maritime security to ensure \u201cthe unimpeded use\u201d of the international waterways and airspace in the region.
\nSenior US defence officials, in the Indo-Pacific Command at Honululu and elsewhere, were more direct in calling for a cooperative security framework. Blaming \u201cclosed and authoritarian\u201d regimes like China for using \u201ccoercive tactics\u201d and \u201ctrying to subvert international norms\u201d in\u00a0South China Sea\u00a0and other areas, they said it would be \u201clogical\u201d to impart a military construct to the Quad. \u201cWe are not pushing it aggressively but see it as a natural progression,\u201d said an official.
\nIndia, like the other three Quad countries, is also wary of China\u2019s rapidly-expanding military and expeditionary capabilities. But it has studiously kept Australia out of the trilateral Malabar exercise with the US and Japan to avoid needling a prickly China, which sees any multi-lateral naval grouping in the region as a security axis seeking to contain it. China, after all, had lodged a strong protest when the Malabar exercise in the Bay of Bengal in 2007 had been expanded to include Australia and Singapore as well.
\nIndia, of course, continues to strengthen its strategic and military ties with the other three Quad countries on a bilateral and trilateral basis. Amid the Chinese Navy\u2019s expanding footprint in the Indian Ocean Region, India is also undertaking \u201cmission-based naval deployments\u201d with warships spread across choke points from the Persian Gulf to Malacca Strait for any operational contingency, as reported by TOI earlier.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relevant for prelims and GS paper 2(IR):- WASHINGTON\/HONOLULU: The \u201cQuad\u201d countries, namely India, US, Japan and Australia, will hold their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[136,817,413,392],"class_list":["post-3355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-current-affairs","tag-gs","tag-ias","tag-union-public-service-commission-upsc"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3356,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355\/revisions\/3356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}