Why some Pacific powers may be siding with US against China

For President Joe Biden, convening a White House summit Friday of a once-obscure Indo-Pacific grouping of countries is all about signaling a post-Afghanistan shift to Asia and confronting an increasingly aggressive China.

By doing so, he is pushing on an open door: America’s “Quad” partners – Australia, India, and Japan – have all undergone their own pivots in weighing the risk of provoking Asia’s economic powerhouse against the benefit of closer U.S. alignment, including on security.

“The summit is further evidence ... of the turning point that the Quad represents for Indo-Pacific relations and for the era of intensifying competition with a more assertive China,” says Dhruva Jaishankar, executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America, a private Indian think tank in Washington.

“In all four countries there are internal debates over how

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