QUAD LIKELY TO BE SHELVED, SAYS US COMMANDER

SINGAPORE: A US military commander suggested on Thursday that a loose security grouping of his country, Japan, Australia and India, also known as the quad, may be shelved for now.

Phil Davidson, who heads the US Indo-Pacific Command, said he was on a panel with the other navy chiefs at the Raisina Dialogue, a multilateral conference in New Delhi in January.

Davidson said the issue came up “several times” but Indian navy chief Sunil Lanba “made it quite clear that there wasn’t an immediate potential for a quad”.

“That does not omit or prevent our ability to cooperate in crisis and conflict. And we continue collectively, all of us, to seek opportunities in which we might exercise and work together moving forward,” he added.

Davidson was asked if the quad was relevant to his country’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region, which was the central theme of his lecture in Singapore.

The US and the other three countries had come together to provide humanitarian assistance after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe then suggested they form the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which met three years later.

The meetings stopped for a decade after China formally reached out to each country to seek information on the meetings’ purpose.

The quad met again in 2017. India’s ministry of external affairs said they addressed “issues of common interest” such as terrorism and “proliferation linkages impacting the region”.

India had stressed in the past that the quad was not a military grouping.