Trump’s Quad commitment a boon for Australia
From benign multitasker under former President Biden, Trump 2.0 has signalled this week it expects the Quad’s role will be that of a powerful security bloc with a clear mandate.
The new Trump administration’s recommitment to the Quad this week will give Australia – and fellow members Japan and India – cause for optimism even as it compounds an aura of irrelevance now hanging over the ASEAN bloc.
China hawks will also be cheering the brief but telling statement that came out of Wednesday’s Quad ministerial meeting, which President Trump’s new Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio made one of his first priorities after being sworn into office this week.
The decision to hold the latest Quad ministerial meeting so soon into the Trump administration’s second term reflects a determination to elevate the bloc to something more useful than a diplomatic grouping.
What was made abundantly clear from this week’s statement is that Trump 2.0 sees the Quad not as the benign multitasker that former President Biden tried to shape it into – largely to assuage Southeast Asia nations twitchy about upsetting China – but as a powerful security bloc with a clear mandate.
That mandate is to uphold and defend the rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty and territorial integrity across a free and open Indo-Pacific, and to “strongly oppose any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion”.
“We are committed to strengthening regional maritime, economic, and technology security in the face of increasing threats, as well as promoting reliable and resilient supply chains,” it adds.
China is clearly in the frame even if it is not name-checked anywhere in the pithy 160 word document.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations also fails to get a mention, a pointed omission from previous statements.
That will likely cause some alarm within the 10-country regional bloc which is already seething over Trump defence secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s inability to name a single one of ASEAN’s member states during confirmation hearings this month.
There seems little doubt ASEAN is entering another era of White House irrelevance, after former President Obama’s failed Asia pivot, the dark years of the first Trump administration and an early-but-largely-abandoned effort by Joe Biden to reverse that trend.
Regional alliances and partnerships – with Australia, India, Japan, The Philippines and South Korea – became the necessary focus of the Biden years as its attentions became dominated by the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
That will clearly continue under Trump, though the US President’s recent reference to North Korea as a “nuclear power” has heightened concerns in Seoul and Tokyo that the new US administration could deviate from a longstanding policy of not officially recognising North Korea as a nuclear state, even though it possesses nuclear weapons.
Under Biden, the Quad seemed to lose strategic focus.
Trump seems determined to clarify its role, which Australian Strategic Policy Institute defence and national security director Euan Graham says should come as a relief to Australia, Japan and India and should be seen as a “promising turn in the Quad’s fluctuating fortunes”.
It was Trump who revived the Quad in 2017.
He has wasted no time this week in seeking to define its function – not just as a counterweight to China but as a practical embodiment of the US and its closest allies’ security role in the Indo-Pacific.
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