Don’t fault journalists for adding a little spice to a story. A sprinkle of tangy words like “vital” or “bulwark” serves an important commercial purpose. Adjectives draw eyeballs. They help engage an audience that is not otherwise compelled to follow events – or pay a fee to do so.
But, as we know, this journalistic habit can lead to beat-ups, like this opening paragraph from Joe Kelly in The Australian last week:
“Tony Abbott is warning that Donald Trump’s use of tariffs has jeopardised the future of the Quadrilateral security dialogue between India, Australia, America and Japan – a key strategic grouping which has acted as a vital bulwark against Chinese expansionism.”
I wrote far more jumbled openings in my years as a reporter, and this example from Kelly, done under time pressure, is hardly tabloid-style fodder. But let’s pick up on the word choices made in the last part of that sentence, because it helps to unpack a series of assumptions that are at very least contestable.
First, “key strategic grouping”.
“Strategic” is a word that carries gravitas but increasingly serves as an adornment. It has become so overused in modern international affairs reporting and commentary as to become devoid of meaning – if defined as “of or relating to military strategy” or even more broadly as the long-term pursuit of goals.
The “Quad” has abandoned its original name of “Quadrilateral security dialogue” because it is supposedly no longer just about security. As India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put it last year during a visit to Australia, “The Quad has a bigger purpose … It is not a security agenda.”
India’s reticence to use the word “security”, in the title at least, has led some analysts to wonder if the grouping has been defanged.
Despite what Jaishankar might claim, there is plenty of security still on its agenda – the word appears 26 times in the most-recent Quad leaders’ statement. But this includes issues such as health security, reform of the UN Security Council, sharing data on illegal fishing or smuggling on the high seas, the protection of undersea cables and cyber threats, as well as climate questions, and developing people-to-people links.
The leaders can claim that “the Quad is more strategically aligned than ever before”, but the absence of words like “Russia”, “invasion” or “condemnation” in the leaders’ statement is far more telling about a divergence of views. The only reference to China is in the phrase “South China Sea”.
The point, for international affairs analysts at least, is to remember the drivers behind the choice of language.
The use of “key” in reporting offers an extra embellishment but looks hollow when examining the Quad’s record. It fell well short of a target to distribute at least 1 billion vaccines during the Covid pandemic. The Quad summit was not important enough for Joe Biden to attend when it was planned in Sydney in 2023, caught up as he was with domestic challenges. Talk of India hosting a gathering of the leaders in early 2024 was similarly pushed aside. In part, this was for reasons of scheduling, to avoid becoming a spectacle ahead of India’s election. It was perhaps also because of the background of allegations that Indian intelligence officials had conceived a plot to assassinate a US citizen in New York.
The second phrase that struck me was “vital bulwark”.
That’s again a big assumption. Since 2020, India, Australia, Japan and the United States have participated in joint military drills, undertaken outside the Quad framework. But it’s a stretch to characterise these annual exercises as anything resembling a defensive wall. It certainly hasn’t deterred China, despite “serious concern” being expressed in Quad statements about activities (not attributed to any particular country) in the East and South China Seas.
The premise of stopping “Chinese expansionism” is itself debatable. This might be assumed to be a reference to artificial islands, but such construction predated the Quad in its present manifestation. The border tension with India runs back decades.
The point, for international affairs analysts at least, is to remember the drivers behind the choice of language. The Quad is drawing some excitable media attention presently, with the prospect of Donald Trump visiting Brisbane next year for a Quad meeting, should he decide the forum is indeed a “powerful” one, as another recent story in The Australian described it.
That might depend on whether the Quad leaders get together at all this year. Talk of a meeting in India this month has been overshadowed by the prospect of the four leaders instead gathering on the sidelines in New York during the UN General Assembly. This follows Trump putting a blowtorch on India’s oil purchases from Russia.
Which in turn opens a different debate, more about judgement than word choice – whether Trump is responsible for having “jeopardised” the Quad, or if the grouping has simply been over-hyped?
