Media headlines proclaimed that India had changed course, and signed onto a statement condemning Russia as the responsible party for the war in Ukraine at the conclusion of the Foreign Ministerial of the so-called Indo-Pacific “Quad.” Not so. The statement issued after the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. in New Delhi on Friday included the following clause on Ukraine:
“We continued to discuss our responses to the conflict in Ukraine and the immense human suffering it is causing, and concurred that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. We underscored the need for a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in Ukraine in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter. We emphasized that the rules-based international order must respect sovereignty, territorial integrity, transparency, and peaceful resolution of disputes.”
The Hindu wrote that by calling for a “just and lasting peace in Ukraine,” India had agreed to criticize Russia! It headlined its coverage “Quad Foreign Ministers Take Aim at China, Russia.” The Indian Express claimed that by even mentioning Ukraine, the Quad was “sending a message” against “aggression.” And so forth with other coverage.
The final statement, in fact, does not even mention China by name, although it is riddled with the unmistakable key-and-code language used by the Anglosphere to attack China ("a free and open Indo-Pacific … challenges to the maritime rules-based order, including in the South and East China Seas,” etc.).
It is also obnoxious in its pretension that this rump caucus of countries called the Quad (formally the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), created for geopolitical purposes, has the right and power to set the terms of relations between other Asian Pacific regional associations, such as ASEAN.
China’s Global Times was not impressed. One Chinese expert, Lü Xiang, told the daily that the final joint statement reads like an “improvised document” issued in order to play up the QUAD over the G20, where the U.S. was unable to browbeat the Foreign Ministers into agreeing on a joint statement to its liking. Lu described the Quad statement as “full of clichés,” and noted that the reference to the Ukraine “conflict” rather than “invasion,” which had to be adopted for India to sign it, might anger Ukraine and other European allies, and “could damage the united front against Russia that the US wants to form.”
