How the Quad Built a Hybrid Balancing Strategy Against China, 2018–2024

On 4 September 2026, the Australian Journal of International Affairs published an article by Anshu N. Chatterjee with a long title and a plain argument: the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the grouping of India, Japan, Australia and the United States, worked between 2018 and 2024 because it paired economic tools with security ones. India's World has now reviewed the piece, and its reading is worth following closely.

Chatterjee starts with the problem. China's place in global manufacturing and supply chains gave Beijing economic leverage, and it used that leverage alongside military pressure and low-level warfare around disputed territories and maritime routes. India and Australia were in an awkward spot. Both traded heavily with China and both worried about its regional ambitions, and that dependence limited how directly either could confront it.

To explain how states manage this, she draws on Kai He's framework of integrated institutional balancing. Two considerations shape the choices: economic interdependence and shifts in the regional distribution of power. They produce two kinds of arrangement. Inclusive ones try to bind and constrain a state through shared rules and agreements, while exclusive ones try to isolate it. In her account the Quad did both. Its informality helped, and she writes that the absence of a formal treaty served as an asset, because members could coordinate without giving up strategic autonomy.

Two events in 2020 made the economic side urgent. China restricted Australian exports after Canberra called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and Indian and Chinese forces clashed in the Galwan Valley. Both showed what dependence on Beijing could cost. Members answered through bilateral deals and wider coordination, using investment, trade and technology partnerships to diversify supply chains and build industrial capacity. Chatterjee points to Japanese investment in India's lithium-refining capacity, the India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement signed in April 2022, Tokyo's infrastructure investment in India, and the India-US Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, launched in 2023. Deeper trade with Taiwan gave India and Australia preferential access to critical technologies, and gave Taiwan alternative production sites. In 2022 the Quad also pledged to seek more than $50 billion in infrastructure assistance and investment across the Indo-Pacific over five years, offered as an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative through transparent financing and debt-management reforms. She stresses that none of this meant abandoning trade with China, which continued alongside the balancing.

The security track ran through the sea. India's Malabar naval exercises gave members a platform, and Australia's return in 2020, its first participation since 2007, signalled collective backing while both India and Australia were under Chinese pressure. Logistics-sharing arrangements deepened cooperation, and in 2022 the Quad launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness to improve information-sharing with regional countries. Ties extended to ASEAN members, including a US-Japan-Philippines trilateral dialogue in 2024, with work on piracy, illegal fishing and maritime boundaries under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Because China is a signatory to that convention, Chatterjee argues, anchoring the work there let the Quad push back without direct confrontation.

Beijing replied militarily and institutionally. It stepped up naval activity and criticised the Quad, and it introduced its own initiatives: the Global Development Initiative in 2021, following Quad commitments on pandemic recovery, sustainable development and climate, and the Global Security Initiative in 2022, meant to present China as a regional security provider. Chatterjee reads both as attempts to dilute the grouping. In 2024 Beijing also changed its approach to individual members. It agreed patrolling and disengagement arrangements with New Delhi in eastern Ladakh, hosted Japan's national security adviser for de-escalation talks, and held high-level discussions with Australia. She sees a calculated effort to weaken Quad cohesion by playing on fears of a less committed, more inward-looking Washington.

The review adds its own cautions. Chatterjee's claim that the Quad produced Beijing's 2024 shift should be read carefully, since she herself names China's economic stagnation, an overextended Belt and Road, and its need for markets and resources as factors, along with uncertainty over American policy. Several of her economic examples are also bilateral agreements between members, not Quad-wide deals; she treats them as parts of a cumulative strategy. She argues that the grouping's early success was disrupted by the change of administration in Washington, and that the second Trump administration's ineffective unilateral tariffs underscored the Quad's value. She links its weakening to Beijing suspending some re-engagement, especially with India. How Washington behaves is the test to watch.