After Afghanistan: time for the Quad to take centre stage

The defiant words of that old rabble-rouser Thomas Paine provide a fitting rallying cry for Western leaders after the US-led retreat from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban.

The West now faces a witches’ brew of complex and daunting strategic problems crowding in on it, magnifying and deepening Western anxieties. So leaders might take comfort from Paine’s famous ‘Common sense’ pamphlet addressed to the continental army fighting for American independence in 1776.

‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ Paine wrote. ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph’.

Certainly US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Australian PM Scott Morrison and those of their ilk have faced times that have tried their strategic souls. They have faced a devastating pandemic and accelerating climate change while fighting the Taliban in vain for the future of Afghanistan. At the same time, violent Islamist terrorism has been an ongoing, often bloody, threat.

And throughout it all the United States, leader of the liberal democratic West, has been increasingly mired in deep political divisions that brought the country close to violent insurrection and political gridlock in the dying hours of the appalling Donald Trump presidency.

At the same time, China’s coercive military, political, diplomatic and economic policies have complicated the democratic will. While resisting China’s efforts to dislodge US-led power in the Indo-Pacific region, Western leaders and their Asian allies have struggled to manage other challenges clearly beyond the capabilities of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

For Australia, and others, threats posed by Chinese aggression and by America’s domestic difficulties are the gravest of these challenges. But the cumulative effect of the challenges, and their tendency to act on each other with unexpected consequences, makes the current global environment especially perturbing. A question arises: how many such crises can modern nations, with all of their political, diplomatic, economic and military resources, handle simultaneously before a fatal miscalculation occurs?

Among other things, largely futile international efforts to trace the origins of the Covid-19 virus from Wuhan in China have increased tensions between Beijing and Western powers. Now the US retreat from Afghanistan, and US dysfunctional domestic politics, have inevitably raised doubts about the future value of Australia’s alliance with the US. The international push to cut carbon emissions has intensified the effects of China’s economic bullying of Australia, notably its trade sanctions against Australian coal exports.

At the same time, a…