The Quad’s Search for Non-Military Roles and China’s Strategic Response: Minilateralism, Infrastructure Investment, and Regional Balancing

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘Quad’)—a cooperative consisting of the US, Japan, Australia, and India—has re-emerged since 2017 after a decade of dormancy. After typologizing the minilateral security cooperation’s goals and its expansion, this article explains that the current Quad is an expanded minilateral cooperation of the existing various security bilaterals and trilaterals among its member states. This minilateral has increased its non-military cooperation, focusing on infrastructure-building to counter that of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Indo-Pacific region. It also examines how China has been responding to this line of the Quad’s economic responses, while China is cautious about the Quad’s security implications. It concludes with some predictions as to how this set of interactions is likely to influence the regional order.