Biden’s 11th hour Quad snub a disappointment, a mess and a gift to Beijing

In fact, the Quad is a nebulous grouping that is anything but a formal alliance. It doesn’t have an official website or a post office box, let alone a secretariat.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe initiated the Quad in 2007 to support what he hoped would be an “Asian Arc of Democracy”, but the group collapsed just a year later.

The Quad came back to life in the Trump era and Biden elevated it to new heights in 2021 by making it a leaders-level grouping. So far, its practical outcomes have been unremarkable: a vaccine sharing initiative that struggled to get off the ground, plus measures to track illegal fishing vessels and create a low-emission shipping network.

The group’s power – and the reason Beijing despises it so much – lies in what it represents.

While the Quad leaders never mention China by name in their official joint statements, the grouping’s reason for being is to offer an alternative to Beijing’s authoritarianism.

“We are liberal democracies and believe in a world order that favours freedom,” Scott Morrison proclaimed after the first in-person Quad leaders meeting in 2021.

With a total population size of almost 2 billion people and the possibility to later include nations such as South Korea and Canada, the Quad’s potential influence is huge.

As Kevin Rudd, now Australia’s man in Washington, has written: “Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.”

Xi’s nightmare is that the Quad continues gaining steam, entrenching itself as a permanent and effective feature of the region’s diplomatic architecture. Any setback for the Quad is a morale boost for Xi.

Just as unfortunate is the fact Biden will no longer travel to Papua New Guinea for what would have been the first visit by a US leader to the nation. The Pacific is the front line of US-China geostrategic competition and Biden’s failure to show up is a loss of momentum after impressive recent efforts to restore America’s standing in the region.

As former senior State Department official Evan Feigenbaum noted on Twitter: “The issue isn’t commitment but dysfunction. The US can profess to be ‘committed’ all it wants. But it’s tough to ‘lead’ when everyone you hope will follow you wonders why you keep deliberately steering toward hurling yourself off a cliff.”

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