New Delhi
29 June 2011
For Japan, three is not a crowd. Four maybe. While it agrees that a more robust Asian security architecture will be required if China's opaque military modernisation continues, for now it will be content with trilateral or three-way security dialogues involving India, Australia and the United States, without giving it the shape of a Quadrilateral or resurrecting notions of containing China. Currently, Japan has trilateral dialogues with the US and India; with the US and Australia; and with China and South Korea. India is the third country, after the US and Australia, with which Japan has the two-plus-two talks involving foreign and defence ministers. New Delhi is expected to host the inaugural India-US-Japan trilateral dialogue later this year. It will be conducted by officials, and not by foreign ministers as was mentioned in the April 8 press release issued by the ministry of external affairs after foreign secretary Nirupama Rao's talks in Tokyo. Besides discussing anti-piracy cooperation and maritime security, the talks could progressively extend to cover security and defence cooperation.
China's military rise has caused concerns in the region and beyond. Without naming China, Australian defence minister Stephen Smith recently said, "All we ask in terms of a growth of military capacity is that one is transparent as to its strategic intentions". That view is shared by Tokyo. "We keep asking the Chinese what is your intention
[but] unfortunately we have not received a convincing explanation," AKITAKA SAIKI, Japan's new ambassador to India, said Wednesday in an interaction at the Observer Research Foundation here. "While Japan has no intention to undermine good neighbourly relations with China, I hope China will be a little more sensitive to concerns expressed by its neighbours. Actions need to match words, that's my view," he observed. Mr Saiki cautioned that the future trajectory of trilateral talks would depend on Beijing's attitude.
The current Japanese sentiment stands in contrast to the churning in Australia, which has instituted a Defence Force Posture Review for addressing issues such as "the growth of military power projection capabilities of countries in the Asia Pacific" -- an indirect reference to China's reach and influence. In a recent interaction with this newspaper, Michael Auslin from the US-based American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that Australia, not post-tsunami Japan, could be the lead partner in the Quadrilateral. Dr John Lee from the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, in turn, cited the increasing possibility of Australia lifting the ban on uranium sale to India to suggest that the perception of Australia drifting towards China was not true.
The Quadrilateral was an initiative of Shinzo Abe, who was the Japanese premier from September 2006 to September 2007. On September 4, 2007, the navies of India, Japan, the US, Australia and Singapore conducted joint naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal. However, later that year, Australia's then newly elected prime minister and current foreign minister Kevin Rudd unilaterally withdrew from the Quadrilateral Initiative. The strategic pact has remained stillborn ever since. It suffered another setback after Abe's Liberal Democratic Party lost power to the Democratic Party in 2009. India did not show any particular interest, either. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in Beijing in January 2008 that India was "not part of any so-called 'contain China' effort".
