Can Minilaterals Deliver a Security Architecture in the Indian Ocean?

The opening decades of the 21st century have made new demands of Asia's regional security landscape. Both China's rise and uncertainty over the security commitments of the United States in the region have fueled a resurgence of traditional security concerns. The national security interests of U.S. treaty allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia have grown more diverse, even as previously nonaligned states, especially India, increasingly value strategic partnership with the United States in the shape of military transfers, logistical access, and capacity building.¹ The same power transition that put first Asia and then the wider Indo-Pacific region at the center of world politics has driven demand for greater status parity among global and regional powers and an appetite for less hierarchical forms of diplomatic and security collaboration. Minilaterals, as small and flexible forms of closely networked cooperation, have addressed several of these challenges and hold promise—to some—as a bridge from the post–World War II bilateral alliance system of the United States to a new regional security order.²

Minilaterals: Tolerant of Diversity or Disguising Dissonance?

The advantages of minilaterals are several. On traditional security issues, they can function as multipliers of military and economic capabilities and accelerators of in-group exchange. At the same time, minilaterals are "diversity tolerant." They permit relative policy autonomy among members because their agendas are flexible, ad hoc, and issue-focused, and they avoid the requirement that smaller powers doggedly serve the strategic goals of larger powers.³ They also reduce the risk of free-riding. Minilaterals can function as a site for the coordination of political dialogue outward and the sharing of intelligence inward and as a potential mechanism for the re-legitimation of global norms, such as those centered on maritime governance.⁴

Minilaterals can also, however, disguise dissonant agendas. In the Indian Ocean, for example, the U.S.-dominated Quad has an Indo-Pacific remit that seeks to fold India into a balancing coalition against China. Yet the stakes are somewhat higher for India as the only Quad member to share a land border—and a fractious one—with the Asian giant.⁵ Australia, Japan, and India share an interest in enmeshing the United States in the region, a drive that was particularly pronounced during the Trump administration.⁶ The priorities of three of the Quad members are concentrated in the Pacific, while India is more focused on the Indian Ocean region.⁷ A further area of dissonance is that the growing enthusiasm for the Quad—manifest most prominently in the group's convening of its first leader-level summit in 2021—has not been matched by growing U.S., Japanese, and Australian commitments in the Indian Ocean.

This tacit asymmetry of security interests across the two "theaters" of the Indian and Pacific Oceans has so far worked for Quad members. Yet challenging scenarios such as those presented in this strategic futures exercise can quickly marginalize the balancing potential of ad hoc and informal minilaterals: their greatest virtue—flexibility—becomes their greatest weakness. Crisis situations put hard bipolarity and the potential for great-power conflict center stage, shifting the calculations of weaker, regional powers. Shifts in the internal politics of member states can remove or lessen the domestic bases of support for minilaterals—as exemplified by the first, short-lived incarnation of the Quad in 2007 and 2008 that fell afoul of changes in leadership in Japan and Australia. Other core minilaterals, such as the Australia-Japan-India, Australia-India-France, and Australia-India-Indonesia trilaterals, may prove less fragile as they are primarily forums of economic and political coordination. Yet without the participation of the United States, their balancing capacity vis-à-vis China is less meaningful.

The Performance of Minilaterals across the Three Scenarios

In scenario one of the strategic futures exercise ("Not India's Ocean"), minilaterals, especially the Quad, would continue to matter for two reasons: legitimacy and influence. To maintain the trust and a spirit of shared regional ownership, and given India's long-standing and difficult-to...