What Does the "Squad" Have in Store?
The “Squad” in the South China Sea
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin last week hosted his counterparts from the Philippines, Japan, and Australia for a quadrilateral meeting in Hawaii, establishing a minilateral grouping Pentagon officials informally dubbed the “Squad”. Austin remarked that the gathering was due to the four “[sharing] a vision for peace, stability and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific”, and that the four had “...chartered an ambitious course to advance that vision together”.
The Philippines has routinely conducted joint maritime patrols, in various formats, with the three Squad partners, in the context of rising tensions over Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. In this vein, Austin remarked that the quadrilateral is consolidating to form a long-term security grouping. In the future, the Squad nations hope to enhance military interoperability, conduct more joint patrols and drills, and enhance intelligence and maritime security cooperation. A US official also said that the grouping aimed to “counter coercion and aggression across Asia, as well as ensure that defence capabilities among their militaries are increasingly interoperable, allowing them to work more efficiently together in the event of conflict”.
Not only does the formation of the Squad take place in the backdrop of Chinese aggressiveness in the South China Sea, but it is also a testament to growing minilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. This also takes place during a major reorientation of the Philippines’ foreign policy under Marcos Jr.
On the formation of the grouping, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert and media commentator, told the Global Times:
The US is clearly trying to rally its allies - Japan and Australia - to support the Philippines, encourage the Philippines to engage in more military provocations in the South China Sea, exacerbate the complexity of the regional situation, and then find excuses to strengthen the military presence of the US, Japan and Australia in the South China Sea
He also said that “...the involvement of external countries and forces in South China Sea issues will only further complicate the situation in the region, and flaunting their military power will not only affect normal regional cooperation but may also lead to conflicts”.
Analysts and commentators have wondered whether this means that the Other Quadrilateral—the Quad, with India in the mix minus the Philippines, will lose relevance, interest, and fuel.
But that question is, in some sense, misplaced. The Quad and the Squad have different functions. The latter is military-oriented and works primarily to establish maritime security through building interoperability between the four militaries. The Squad’s raison d'être is meeting maritime security challenges in the South China Sea.
The Quad, on the other hand, focuses broadly on non-securitised areas of cooperation, like infrastructure, energy, cybersecurity, and counterterrorism. The quartet fashions itself as a public goods provider to Indo-Pacific countries. In the US patchwork of regional allies in the Indo-Pacific, both, in some sense, complement each other rather than displace. In this vein, Yoichiro Sato, Professor of Asia-Pacific Studies at Japan’s Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University, even suggests the formation of the Squad might lead to greater India-Philippines cooperation:
…the two overlapping four-party arrangements ‘facilitate greater cohesion within each group’, allowing both India and the Philippines to ‘collaborate comfortably with Australia, Japan, and the US