Description
The QUAD will likely be the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy. In this regard, his administration’s approach is effectively picking up where the Trump administration left off and continuing within similar policy boundaries. For the past four US presidencies, the US has been incrementally transforming the Cold War-era “hub and spokes” security system of East Asia into a format of networked multilateralism where the spokes are encouraged to forge bilateral and trilateral ties amongst themselves, thus becoming semi-hubs themselves. The QUAD is the embodiment of this shift as its members are increasingly networked into a complex web of mutual agreements. This paper aims for a theoretical explanation of the embrace of the QUAD as a tool of its security policy in the Indo-Pacific.
