If I were China’s President Xi Jinping, I would be mighty pleased at one level that five countries, one of them still a superpower, one a has-been super power, one a wannabe superpower, one which does not want to be a superpower even while wanting to be and one never-gonnabe-superpower, have to join hands to contain my country’s perceived global threat.
Yesterday, US President Joe Biden joined Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison to announce a trilateral security partnership to confront China. The partnership includes helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines and patrol the Pacific where the Chinese are constantly flexing their muscles. That takes care of my reference to a current superpower (America), a has-been superpower (Britain) and never-gonnabe-superpower (Australia.) That still leaves the wannabe superpower which would be India and Japan, the one which does not want to be a superpower even while wanting to be.
India fits in a somewhat different context here. India along with Japan make up what is known as the QUAD, a quadrilateral arrangement with America and Australia.
It is interesting that Biden announced this trilateral security partnership barely nine days before the QUAD leaders, Biden, Morrison, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga meet for an “in-person” summit in Washington on September 24. One of the overarching objectives of the QUAD is also to confront and contain China.
So If I were Xi, I would be pleased in my strongman impulses that five countries feel compelled to gang up against me. That may or may not be true but the optics of these two arrangements would play well within China’s assertively nationalistic Communist Party cadres whose number touch a staggering 95 million. I am told that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose members can rival the Chinese Communists in professing nationalism, has a bigger membership base.
The trilateral security partnership does have the potential to confuse the mandate of the QUAD and that too coming as it did just days before the latter’s summit. I would be interested to see how Tokyo would perceive Canberra with nuclear-powered submarines. It is true that Australia and Japan are allies now even as Australia’s once strong relationship with China has hit its nadir. But remember in international diplomacy there are no permanent friends or foes. There are only permanent national interests.
One of the dangers of this trilateral and quadrilateral comings together is that it could also fuel China’s paranoia and might provoke it to do something dramatic. The easiest place for it do something dramatic is with India being its next-door neighbor. It is a delicate balance for New Delhi to be part of the QUAD even while professing to have good working relations with Beijing. China does not yet have a matching security partnership except for its unequal ties with Russia, a shadow of the former Soviet Union. Pakistan, notwithstanding its nuclear weapons, is only just a poodle here.
It would be interesting to see how the QUAD summit plays out in the aftermath of the US-UK-Australia security partnership.
I am sure Beijing is paying close attention to both.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan at the U.N. General Assembly (File photo: Jay Mandal/On Assignment)
On a tangential note, I wonder what Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan thinks in his private mind about the huge chasm between his country's global ambition it perceives buttressed by its nuclear weapons and what the actual reality is. It was a country that was carved out of India inhabited essentially by the same stock of people and yet so removed from a grouping like the QUAD. In a perverse way though it says something about the craftiness of the Pakistani state that it has for 20 years managed to broadly two-time America with China and China with America.
