Excerpt from my article “Quad-Plus? Carving out Canada’s Middle Power Role“

From the vantage point of Southeast Asia, the Quad in its current form is unlikely to get regional buy-in from ASEAN or Southeast Asian states. First, there is no dominant view within the region as to how to engage the Quad. Even Vietnam and the Philippines, the two countries with strong anti-Chinese sentiment, would not like to see the Quad evolve into a hard security-focused regional institution, as it would place them in a position in which they need to choose between their security and their economic prosperity. Both would welcome the Quad as a new actor in the region, depending on what the Quad intends to do. For them, the right formulation of the Quad would be another tool to hedge against China.

Other Southeast Asian states do not view the Quad in such utilitarian manner. For many, if the US–China rivalry is the basis for the Quad, it becomes an initiative that ASEAN will be unable to support. That said, for most, the Quad is another tool in the hedging box and a useful means to keep the United States engaged and to bring in other stakeholders to maximize the strategic autonomy that ASEAN carefully guards.

If the evolution of the Quad focuses on maritime security, there is more potential to get support from ASEAN. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, other areas have emerged as potential pillars of cooperation that could be implemented by the Quad countries in their present form or an enlarged Quad Plus format.

For instance, COVID-19 demonstrated the vulnerabilities that Southeast Asian states face in terms of supply chains and in particular the vulnerability of their medical supply chains. States like Vietnam and Cambodia, which are deeply dependent on China’s supply chains, are increasingly in need of finding ways to diversify their trade and supply-chain portfolio to preserve their strategic autonomy as the US–China strategic competition intensifies.

The Quad represents one of many tools the region can use to meet its needs. To capitalize on this, the Quad needs to be reinvented to focus on the needs of Southeast Asian countries rather than some kind of Indo-Pacific NATO arrangement to contain China. Here, Japan’s FOIP and its overlap with aspects of the Quad in terms of membership and several policy agendas may be a template to get support from Southeast Asian countries for not only a more proactive role for the Quad in the Indo-Pacific but importantly, expanded membership to bring in more resources to the region.

Critical to garnering support will be the inclusion of a clear statement supporting ASEAN Centrality, an overt shift toward infrastructure and connectivity, development, and trade as the key pillars of a reinvented Quad.

An example the Quad can follow is FOIP’s shift away from a more security-focused FOIP 1.0 to what Hosoya Yuichi of Keio University calls FOIP 2.0, a revamped FOIP that is more in line with the needs of the littoral states in the Indo-Pacific.

Read the full paper:

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