Balancing Act: Making sense of the Quad

In this age of strategic contest, with China seeking to dominate a disrupted Indo-Pacific region, the challenge for Australia is to avoid conflict without compromising its interests and values. It can only succeed in this by working with others: when a nation’s interests outweigh its capabilities, and the rising power’s tactic is to isolate and intimidate, it must seek safety in numbers. The only realistic goal is competitive coexistence. Until relatively recently, Australia and many other Indo-Pacific countries seeking security in the region were caught between the narrow choices of bilateralism and multilateralism. In the second half of the twentieth century, bilateralism dominated. The American-led alliance system in Asia was rigidly fixed to a “hub and spokes” model: America’s friends and allies mediated their security relations through Washington, and had little to do with one another.