With eye on China, India to host trilateral talks with Japan, US this year; Japan does not fancy the Quadrilateral with Australia

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".

India and US agree to disagree on China, too

New Delhi

22 May 2011

A "national consensus across the board" was required on whether China is "a threat or is [it] a neighbour that we can go along with", former national security adviser MK Narayanan had posed three years ago, delivering the 25th Air Chief Marshal PC Lal Memorial Lecture here.

Much water has flown down the Brahmaputra since then, but China has remained reluctant to resolve the boundary question. There is no explicit agreement on the issue of stapled visa, either. China's foray into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) has further roiled the Sino-Indian discourse, all of which forced New Delhi to tweak the Dragon's tail, first by feting Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in Norway, and then by omitting any reference to one-China from the joint statement issued towards the end of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit here in December 2010.

Today, just when New Delhi was coming around to the view that its relationship with Beijing was indeed "adversarial" in many respects, and, therefore, it required to be handled with prudence and firmness, comes sobering news from an American official and an academic that only reinforces what Admiral Robert Willard, head of the US Pacific Command, had said during his visit here in September 2010.

The Admiral had told journalists that the US shared India's concerns about China's assertiveness and its presence in PoK, but while "any change in military relations or military manoeuvres by China that raises concerns of India" could certainly be considered as occurring within his area of responsibility, India will have to tackle its issues on its own.

Michael Auslin from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told this correspondent in New Delhi that the issues of stapled visa and Jammu and Kashmir were problems between India on the one hand and China and Pakistan on the other, unlike the South China Sea, which was a global common. Auslin noted that the contours of US-China ties had of late changed from "engage, then hedge" to "hedge, then engage."

A further indication of where Washington stood on India's core issues was provided by an American official who insisted that the US-China relations was neither an either/or case nor a friend-or-foe choice. This official said it was "only natural" that as China rises, it becomes assertive; that "confrontation is not inevitable", and both the US and China had much to gain from cooperation than conflict.

By India's own admission, the challenge of fashioning a coherent China policy is made difficult by the cold reality, brought home after Osama bin Laden's killing, that Pakistan's strategic value to the US will likely remain; India was alone in its fight against terrorism, and that Washington could not be expected to fight New Delhi's battles.

Save for former US national security adviser Gen James Jones (Retd)'s remark about how lucky the US was to have Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who took "personal risk along the Pakistani-Indian border to make sure that there's no provocation", there has been no recompense for India or the 26/11 victims.

The dissonance between India and the US also extends to Afghanistan and Iran. India's abstention on Libya vote, and rejection of US aircraft from a multi-billion dollar tender, have accentuated the divergences.