By Kalinga Seneviratne*
The current international tariff saga based on a notion of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) ideology promoted by President Donald Trump and supported by millions of Americans should, one would hope, trigger Asia’s own MAGA (Make Asia Great Again). The latter is shaping up more the reality than the former.
To give teeth to it and drive this MAGA movement, an Asian QUAD needs to be launched that includes China, Japan, South Korea and India. Japan’s realization of the futility of its flirting with the West to form an Asian NATO; China’s fierce tariff battle with the US; South Korea’s impeachment of a president backed by the pro-American Christian evangelicals; and India’s deep resentment of US pressure to cut its trade ties with Russia, have all created the environment for such a grouping to be born.
Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing have recently shown signs of the formation of such an alliance, and New Delhi needs to be drawn into this. Since the June 2020 border skirmish between China and India, where India lost 20 soldiers, Washington has been fiercely wooing India with offers of access to hi-tech arms and nuclear technology among others, which are mainly military in nature.
The US would like India to be its Israel in Asia, a possibility that has rattled India’s South Asian neighbors and isolated India in the region. Yet, India has not fallen into that trap and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s excellent address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023 on the “rules based order”, where he argued that such an order cannot exist if rules are made by a few to benefits themselves. Though he did not name any country, it was obviously directed at the West, and the US in particular. China would have quietly applauded that speech.
Those who voted Trump to power, have exposed the futility of the QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) that was set up by the behest of the United Sates (US) and includes Australia, India and Japan to contain China with a military focus.
Australia ditched it when it joined the AUKUS Anglo-Saxon club to jointly build nuclear powered submarines to defend itself from China – Australia’s biggest trading partner. Now it is time for India and Japan to ditch it as well, and join forces with China and South Korea to form an Asian Quad – let’s call it QUADD (Quadrilateral Development Dialogue) that is focused on economic, trade, and development issues.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, India tried hard to gear QUAD towards a development agenda, but it failed miserably, while for the US – be it a Republican or Democratic president – their major concern was to use QUAD to see Asia as a theatre of conflict, and arm its allies to defend them from a mostly imagined or hyped up – Chinese military threat. If Asians fight each other, that will ensure, the western hegemony will continue in the region.
If China is a partner in the new Asian QUAD (or whatever you call it) that threat does not exist. Europe has the European Union to protect its security and for Europeans to talk to each other without outside interference. Asia needs such a structure, to drive the global agenda in a multipolar world. The annual East Asian Summit is a joke, it is a community without an identity as it includes outsiders such as the US and Russia.
In the late 1980s when the Asian economies were rising, the then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad proposed an East Asian Caucus that would include the 10 members of ASEAN, and Japan, China and South Korea. He argued that Asians need a strong voice in international affairs as its economies rise.
This idea was scuttled by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, when during a speech in Seoul on 31 January 1989 he proposed an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping that included his Anglo-Saxon cousins – the US, New Zealand and Canada. Ten months later, 12 Asia-Pacific economies met in Canberra to establish APEC.
A furious Mahathir refused to attend the first APEC Summit in Seattle in November 1993, which led to the then Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating calling him a “recaltricant” that created a diplomatic furor, and relations between Malaysia and Australia were in the doldrums for over a decade.
When APEC was formed, India was not included, and New Delhi was not pleased with it. In the 1990s, in East Asia, India and the South Asian nations were seen as the “Indian-subcontinent” ignoring history where Indian philosophy and culture shaped most of the Southeast and East Asian nations for centuries. At the time, India was seen as a stagnant, backward nation immersed in poverty and internal conflicts.
But, today India is a global economic and technological powerhouse. As Columbia University’s development economist Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs noted recently, India is the world’s most populous country, with the world’s third largest economy measured at international prices (purchasing-power parity), at $17 trillion, behind China ($40 trillion) and the United States ($30 trillion) and ahead of all the rest. India is the fastest growing major economy in the world, with annual growth of around 6% per year and it is a nuclear-armed nation, a digital technology innovator, and a country with a leading space program.
India (along with China) sees itself as a voice for the Global South. This was demonstrated at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023, when India steered the agenda away from a focus on Ukraine and towards a global development agenda. Japan, even though they have been a member of the exclusive western club – the G7 – for over 4 decades, has never been able to sway its agenda towards a less western-centric one, especially when it came to global development issues.
At the Hiroshima G7 Summit in May 2023, Japan’s attempt to steer the meeting towards adopting a Green Development agenda favorable to the Global South, was politely moved aside, and they adopted a “de-risking” policy to scuttle Chinese supply chains and its economic rise. India, which was an invitee to the summit, had no voice there.
While Trump is trying to lure Japan into an anti-China trade block at the moment, as Japan Times points out, around 20% of Japan’s total commerce is with China, larger than its trade with the United States. India-China bilateral trade has been on the rise, with China being India’s largest trading partner. In 2023, the total trade between the two countries reached $136.2 billion. After a high level meeting of trade officials from both countries in late April, in a significant move that promises to reshape the economic landscape between two of Asia’s largest economies, China has announced its readiness to open its markets to a greater variety of Indian goods. According to World Bank figures, South Korea’s trade with China, valued at over $ 152 billion, is almost double of that with the US at just over $82 billion.
A formal trade and development based QUAD arrangement in Asia between its 4 economic powers could hasten Asia’s MAGA and dwarf anything Trump’s MAGA can achieve. It could also be able to control outside influencers who are trying to use the Philippines to create trouble in the South China Sea, and Dalai Lama’s pro-western followers who are trying to destabilize the Himalayan borders between India and China.
With all four countries’ history of Indic-Buddhist civilizational influences, the peaceful ideas that Buddhism promotes could be a gel to hasten Asia’s peaceful rise, rather than the West’s attempts to make the region a theatre of conflict like what they have done in the Middle East.
Asian media need to get behind this Asian MAGA movement, rather than acting like an echo chamber for western media’s adversarial reporting culture.
*Kalinga Seneviratne is the author of the recently published book “ Global News Media: Countering Western Hegemony In International News” (Atlantic, 2025).