Quad summit will be a diplomatic challenge for Penny Wong as she meets with Marco Rubio amid defence storm

Foreign Minister Penny Wong will fly into the eye of the storm this week as she heads to Washington for high-level talks on Indo-Pacific security under growing pressure from the Trump administration for Australia to hike its defence spending.

Senator Wong on Tuesday will join her counterparts from India and Japan at a meeting of the Quad, a four-way regional security and diplomatic dialogue between Australia, the US, Japan and India, and hosted by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

As she does so, she must strike the delicate balance between backing efforts by the US and regional allies to ensure the Indo-Pacific remains “free and open” against an unprecedented military build-up by Beijing, while dampening the chances of China, Australia’s largest trading partner, to make well-rehearsed accusations of “provocation”.

The Foreign Minister may also face a diplomatic dance in a bilateral meeting with Mr Rubio in responding to US demands that Canberra lift its military budget to 3.5 per cent of GDP at a time when the Pentagon is reviewing its commitment to the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine program deemed vital to Australia’s national security efforts.

Meanwhile at home, the Opposition is calling for the summit to produce substantive results.

“Penny Wong should be urging more concrete strategic and security initiatives through the Quad,” said Andrew Hastie, acting shadow foreign minister.

“Summitry gestures of solidarity are good,” he added. “But we must start building supply chains and sharing some military tech through the quad platform that advances the interests of all Quad members.”

Beijing, which views the Quad grouping with suspicion as a nascent Asian NATO, has already indicated it will be watching this week’s meeting in Washington closely.

China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, in a commentary piece in the Australian that appeared as Senator Wong was boarding a plane for the US, warned that increasing military spending would impose a “heavy fiscal burden” on the Government’s budget.

“Dramatically increasing military spending places a heavy fiscal burden on the countries involved, undermining their efforts to boost economies and improve livelihoods, and further straining a global economy already struggling with weak recovery,” he wrote.

Mr Xiao’s apparent attempt to sway public debate, ahead of an expected meeting between the Prime Minister and Chinese President Xi Jinping, also played down his nation’s defence spending as “normal” just weeks after Defence Minister Richard Marles warned China was engaged in the largest military build-up since World War II without “any strategic reassurance”.

This week’s Quad meeting, which will likely pave the ground for a leaders’ level summit hosted by India later this year, is the second such gathering since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Experts say that while this may indicate Washington’s growing emphasis on Indo-Pacific security, that the Quad is unlikely to take on a stronger defence role in the near future due to differing national interests and uncertainty around the Trump administration’s approach to China.

The “Quad” is a strategic dialogue between the four partner countries and not a military alliance like NATO.

Quad members have historically tread carefully with regional sensitivities about military alignments by stressing their diplomatic and foreign policy cooperation.

However, in a nod to the worsening strategic environment, a Quad statement in January, mentioned maintaining “security in all domains,” before explicitly adding that, “we also strongly oppose any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion,” — a phrase viewed as a veiled reference to China’s military ambitions.

David Andrews, a senior policy advisor, at ANU’s National Security College, said it was “notable that we’re seeing two meetings within the first six months of the Trump presidency.”

But while the group taking on a harder security dimension would be consistent with the Trump defence agenda, the interests of the four states were not sufficiently aligned for it to function as “principally a defence or security entity,” he said.

“A lot of it will come down to what happens in the room in the days ahead and how far the US wants to push things like, for instance, … [to] include a defense pillar,” he said.

Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, a resident senior fellow and India foreign policy expert at Australian Strategic Policy Institute said the Quad needed to bring its security agenda back into focus, particularly on maritime security and industrial cooperation.

“The Quad is a perfect grouping to take on maritime security in a big way” as well as looking at strengthening the defence industry base, she said.

But when it came to the broader security agenda, India, in particular, was treading cautiously, she said.

“India-US relations are going through some very tricky times,” she said, including a recent “irritant” this month when President Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, at the White House.

Sam Roggeveen, Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, agreed that India was keen to avoid the Quad being given a harder edge or to be part of any US-led strategy of containment against China.

“They are very sensitive about any sense . . . that this is some kind of Asian NATO in the making. I think that the Indians are very allergic to that,” he said.

The Quad’s wider security role was also curbed by economics and geography, he argued.

“Apart from the United States, the three other members of the Quad all have a much more interdependent economic relationship with China,” he said.

“And then geography. Asia is just so huge that it’s difficult to see how any of these four countries, particularly the three smaller countries, would ever have a vital interest in defending any of the others,” he added.

“This can’t ever become a kind of Asian NATO, because these countries are physically just too far apart.”

Dr Euan Graham, a senior analyst at ASPI, said tensions between the US and all of its Quad partners would be a “drag” on the body taking up a bigger defence role.

While there was “obvious sense” in bulking up the agenda to include defence, which was in everyone’s interests, this would likely be held back by bumpy relations and differing opinions.

“The weakest link at the moment is the US-India relationship. I think everything hangs on that because of (Narendra) Modi being the host for the Quad leaders later this year,” he said.

“There’s probably caution in Canberra as well about moving defence onto the agenda, just because there is a difference of views between Canberra and Washington about defence spending that may make the foreign minister’s position more conservative than it would otherwise be.”