Karat (top) Rudd

Washington, April 6: Prakash Karat has found a foreign policy ally in the nonChinese world’s first Mandarinspeaking Australian Prime Minister, who is more ideologically close to him than anyone in the UPA.

Kevin Rudd and the new Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith have together killed the nascent “Asian arc of democracy”, which the Manmohan Singh government had considered one of its signal foreign policy achievements.

After Rudd’s summit meeting with US President George W. Bush a few days ago, it is now clear that there will be no second meeting of the “Quad”, the quadrilateral strategic dialogue, which brought together India, the US, Japan and Australia.

The first meeting of the Quad, attended by India with the conviction that it would be one of the gateways for New Delhi to big power status, was held in Manila in May last year.

China, fearful that the fournation dialogue would become the nucleus of an “Asian Nato” had sent a de marche to India seeking details of the meeting and its objectives.

The Manila meeting was held immediately after India, Japan and the US conducted their first tripartite naval exercises in the Pacific.

The Left parties had been suspicious of the Quad and had criticised it as evidence of India cosying up to the US in an antiChina alliance.

The Quad is believed here to be the brainchild of US VicePresident Dick Cheney, who successfully sold the idea to hawkish former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then to the Bush administration’s ally, the recently ousted Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Cheney has been keen to build new Natotype alliances outside the traditional areas of the North Atlantic Treaty region as the Bush administration’s legacy to US military strategy in the postSeptember 11, 2001, world.

The Manmohan Singh government has been enthusiastic about the Quad although expression of its enthusiasm has been subdued because it feared opposition from the Left parties and was unsure of BJP support for the idea.

Shortly after the Labour government in Australia took office on December 3, 2007, China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi made his maiden trip to Australia.

At a joint press conference by Yang and Smith, the new Australian foreign minister sought to please his Chinese counterpart by publicly offering to put an end to the quadrilateral strategic dialogue involving India.

Although no reporter asked about India or the Quad at the joint news conference, Smith volunteered that “one of the things which caused China concern last year was a meeting of that strategic dialogue plus India, which China expressed some concern with”. He assured Yang that “Australia would not be proposing to have a dialogue of that nature.… We have a good relationship with India, but we need to take that relationship as well to a higher level, but we are not proposing to have a dialogue along the lines as occurred last year.”

Today, Smith proposed a second sop to New Delhi for killing the Quad, reversing the Howard government’s decision to sell uranium to India and its ambivalent concern about the IndoUS nuclear deal.

Today, he said in an interview in Perth that “we think the permanent membership (of the UN Security Council) should be changed to reflect the modern reality, having on the permanent membership Japan, for example, and India, for example.”

In talks with US officials in the run up Rudd’s visit to Washington, Smith agreed to support India’s membership of the Asia Pacific Economic Community as well.

Rudd who has majored in Mandarin and has a Chinese alias, Lù Kèwé, has simultaneously launched Australia’s first “strategic dialogue” with Beijing.

He will visit China from Wednesday.