Chinese Communist Party officials are sprinting to hit strategic milestones, even as the United States tries to rally democratic allies to counter the threats posed.
“There seems to be a race to get to certain goals,” a senior State Department official told reporters following a diplomatic summit in Japan. “They’re accelerating.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has moved to impede that progress by warning allies that Beijing is using economic power to gain leverage over democratic countries while simultaneously modernizing a military that has benefited from espionage and intellectual property theft. A deepening unease over China’s ambitions spurred a trip to Japan this week, where Pompeo and a trio of key Indo-Pacific allies held the kind of meeting that has grown rare in the coronavirus era.
“Just holding the Quad meeting was, I think, itself a success in the current environment and the current conditions,” the Heritage Foundation’s Jeff Smith, a South Asia analyst, said. “The fact that this went forward, I think, was a sign of the administration’s commitment to the Quad.”
Pompeo brought to the forum a denunciation of China’s “exploitation, corruption, and coercion” of neighboring countries.
“This is for the soul of the world,” Pompeo told a Japanese media outlet. “This is about whether this will be a world that operates in this sense that we’re on a rules-based international order system or one that’s dominated by a coercive totalitarian regime like the one in China.”
The other members of the so-called Quad — Australia, India, and Japan — also signaled their alignment with Pompeo’s priorities, but they did so without any explicit criticisms of Beijing. “The other three countries have not named and shamed China the way the U.S. has,” an Indo-Pacific official observed after the meeting.
Pompeo’s team downplayed the significance of that rhetorical difference.
“If you look at the single thing that’s driving all this, it’s a sudden turn toward gross aggression by the Chinese government in its entire periphery,” the senior State Department official said. “I mean, you take it all the way around the Indo-Pacific and its western borders, you’re seeing things that you haven’t seen before, and these are responding to that.”
China worries that the bloc will develop into a “mini-NATO,” but U.S. officials put an emphasis on other forms of cooperation. A second senior State Department official said that it is most important “to speak up when we see disinformation campaigns or Chinese Communist Party propaganda. … It’s important that we shine a light on what the Chinese Communist Party is doing.”
That’s consistent with the “flexible” nature of the Quad coalition, as Smith described it.
“It’s always been in some ways more symbolically important, substantively important,” he said of the bloc. “The four countries by design have tried to keep the coalition flexible and have envisioned it as a coalition that can be scaled up and down in the future in response to changing threat perceptions.”
The ministerial revealed a consensus that the Quad should be broadened to include other democratic nations when possible.
“They have all welcomed the fact that they are open to expanding the quadrilateral to other countries. … Like-minded countries are welcome to join the initiative,” the Indo-Pacific official observed. “The more the number of countries being part of it … the more gravitas it will have in terms of acceptability.”
Such an expansion could change the perception of the Quad as “a military grouping,” the source said, in favor of a nontraditional approach to security.
“When one talks about security, one’s talking about economic capacity and the rule of law, the ability to protect intellectual property, trade agreements, diplomatic relationships,” Pompeo told Nikkei Asian Review. “It’s not just military. … It’s the kind of power that democracies have that authoritarian regimes can never deliver on.”
That attitude puts a premium on preventing economic coercion, as Pompeo’s team hopes to start to cooperate with Japan and other allies to provide poorer nations in the region with alternatives to Chinese development assistance.
A third senior State Department official told reporters that the countries hope to be “coordinating those efforts so that they’re used to best effect, not just us doing something, them doing something, and nobody knowing what each other’s doing on it.”
