THE JAPAN TIMES

APLN member Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, Resident Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), was quoted in The Japan Times, where she argued that joint patrols are important as they reflect a shift within the Quad toward greater cooperation. However, for these joint coast guard patrols to be effective, there needs to be significantly more discussion among the Quad partners.

Raji Pillai Rajagopalan, a geopolitics expert with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that for the joint coast guard patrols to be effective there needs to be “a lot more discussion among the Quad partners.”

“Not every Quad country can be involved in all the theaters and so some sort of division of labor among the four partners is a good way to make it more effective,” she said.

Initial measures are therefore expected to be relatively modest and oriented toward developing mutual understanding and procedures, at least in the short term.

Nevertheless, joint patrols, irrespective of where they are conducted, are important because they reflect a change within the Quad toward such cooperation, Pillai Rajagopalan added.

“Some Quad countries like India have been reluctant to engage in joint security operations,” she said. “A few years ago, (U.S.) Indo-Pacom chief Adm. (Harry) Harris had suggested that the Quad countries do joint patrols and that India was unwilling. Therefore, this represents an important first step in joint security operations.”

Indeed, the partners may have now found a kind of middle ground — or at least a starting point — for expanded cooperation on this front, some say, since this lies at the intersection of traditional and nontraditional security concerns for the Indo-Pacific region.

Read the full article here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons