A success story of hybrid institutional balancing in the Indo-Pacific: a history lesson of the Quad, 2018–2024

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s institutional strategies between 2018 and 2024 compelled Beijing to alter its approach to assert regional hegemony that relied on the leveraging of economic interdependencies and low-level warfare supported by its military power. In response to Beijing’s strategy, the Quad produced a counterapproach that relied on inclusive and exclusive agreements comprising neoliberal and neorealist mechanisms to uphold the liberal rules-based order and preserve the territorial status quo in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad agreements laid an inclusive path for mitigating the pressures produced by their economic interdependence on China and the perception of defence asymmetries to produce a counter to the revisionist threat in the region. These Quad strategies signalled the partners’ collective capacity to exclude China from their future growth while also defending its members’ territorial interests, with implications for Beijing’s future growth amid economic stagnation. This research augments Kai He’s explanatory framework for integrated institutional balancing in the context of US–China rivalry, focusing on the implications of economic interdependence and power distribution on balancing decisions.