The following article appeared in Order from Chaos, the blog of the Brookings Institution. An excerpt is below and the full text can be accessed here.
An important—indeed, singular—objective now should be to preserve a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, the vast strategic space which is home to 60 percent of the world’s population and an even higher proportion of its economic growth. This region remains a possible flashpoint for great power conflict, most notably between China and the United States. A further erosion of the Asian order would also have terrible consequences for the international economy at a moment of particular vulnerability.
Against this backdrop, one minor but important corrective might be a resuscitation of an informal grouping of democratic maritime powers in the region, with a focus on both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The obvious candidates include the United States, India, Japan, and Australia (or “Quad”)...[T]he rationale for a similar arrangement today is even greater and the political circumstances are also more favorable.