External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. | Photo credit: ANI

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that India does not share Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s vision of a Quad and other alliances involving Japan that would eventually lead to an ‘Asian NATO’ to deter China from using military force. A structure like this has been created. Mr Ishiba, who took over as prime minister on Tuesday (Oct 1, 2024), expressed his views in a Hudson Institute paper released last week.

“He is Japanese. It is a country that has a treaty relationship with the United States,” Mr. Jaishankar said, adding that countries with that history and that strategic culture would have a vocabulary. The minister was speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), a think tank headquartered in Washington DC, where the minister is on an official visit.

“We have never been a treaty ally of any country. We do not have such a strategic architecture in mind,” Mr Jaishankar said, when asked about Mr Ishiba’s remarks.

The minister said he could see a certain evolution of that thinking where Mr Ishiba was concerned but that it “wouldn’t be ours”. [India’s thinking]And that India had a different history and a different way.

‘No quad if unconnected’

In a different part of the debate, Mr. Jaishankar said that India is pursuing a policy of multi-alignment, which has been accelerated by globalisation, as a result of global rebalancing. Explaining how it differs from non-alignment, the foreign policy doctrine articulated for decades after India’s independence, Mr. Jaishankar said it differs in a few ways. For example, he said, a non-aligned policy would not be compatible with the Quad or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a grouping of India, the US, Australia and Japan.

He said that India is now open to more and more choices, adding that one of the hallmarks of the non-aligned era was a reluctance to issue alliances with other countries.

“I think there’s less focus on where our stakes are,” he said, adding, “In the unconnected era you won’t have a quad, you’ll have a quad. [the era of] Multi-alignment.

Citing the example of Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, he said that the previous era was also more defensive and based on less capability. Forty years ago, India might have said something about it, but now it can also send ships and contribute to international efforts to secure sea lanes.

Mr. Jaishankar said that India is also willing to take more risks as it wants some results in the era of multi-aligned policy.