The “Quad” – Australia, India, Japan and the United States – insists it isn’t here to make anyone choose sides, while Southeast Asia keeps saying “Please don’t make us choose sides.” So if everyone agrees, why is cooperation still so hard?
Arzan Tarapore, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, returns to preview a white paper built by experts he convened from Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore, asking how those countries would react if the Quad stepped up maritime security cooperation. He explains why the controversial grouping cut its agenda to just four lines of effort at its July 2025 foreign ministers’ meeting, and why a more modest Quad may be a more credible one.
The headline findings: the Quad’s capacity-building activities are far more acceptable than the reflexive “Southeast Asia won’t like it” suggests. The partner with the most capacity, the United States, is also the most provocative, while India is the reverse. Experts disagreed on whether bringing Southeast Asian countries into Quad activities is more or less provocative than the Quad acting alone.
On geography, meanwhile, there was no disagreement at all: the Indian Ocean is far less provocative than the South China Sea, which is why the Quad’s new Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Collaboration Initiative was placed in the IO.
Jim and Ray press: How does ASEAN centrality square with ASEAN having no security mandate? Were early critics right that the Quad was too broad to deliver anything? (“I fear that it was.”) Does “modest” just mean less consequential?
Arzan says the bluntest challenge is that four countries are walking a tightrope defined by twelve others to avoid upsetting one. His answer: China’s behavior is a variable, not just a brake, and security itself is a public good worth a little provocation.
Ray adds a memory from his years in Hanoi: Vietnamese officials praising a U.S. operation that “poked China in the eye”, then in the same breath asking Washington to please be careful.
The conversation also covers why undersea domain awareness shared among Quad members would improve the whole region’s picture of the PLA Navy, how the Middle East’s Combined Air Operations Center can be a model for tiered data sharing among partners with different clearances, and Arzan’s lightning-round verdict on the Modi-Trump quarrel: the strategic rationale is intact, but the damage to trust on the Indian side should not be underestimated.
