“The Quad” Was Steve Bannon’s Fantasy
Bringing a political lens to policy analysis is about knowing whose interests you’re really working for--and too often it’s not the good guys.
Outside the world of Asia policy wonks, scarcely anyone has even heard of “The Quad”—an intermittent meeting of foreign ministers from India, Japan, Australia, and the US. As a matter of habit, the average Asia policy insider, or insider wannabe, reflexively cheers all the neologisms and acronyms of US foreign policy, and the Quad is no exception.
But the absence of serious criticism from the Asia policy landscape is a serious problem. Boosting or favorably analyzing arrangements like the Quad—which is how a lot of smart folks spend their time—is a failure of power-political analysis at a fundamental level.
I mention this because the day after Trump’s inauguration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio participated in the Quad. The joint statement the four foreign ministers issued was bland and highly forgettable…except that it didn’t resemble reality. It was propaganda in the truest sense. And not only did it escape critique; the average Asia watcher probably felt a perverse comfort talking and writing about it, because it gave them the illusion of normalcy.
But at its best, an illusion is all the Quad really is. At worst, it’s a source of greater regional insecurity and a laundering mechanism for reactionary political projects—and the reactionaries have told us so!