Why US and India are taking on China with a ‘Middle Eastern Quad’

It’s a crowded foreign policy week this week, with Indian officials participating in the Moscow-led round of talks with the Taliban on 20 October and External Affairs minister S. Jaishankar in Israel to update the relationship with the new Naftali Benett-Yair Lapid government. And then there was, Monday late evening, the part-virtual, part-in person summit between the foreign ministers of India, Israel, UAE, and the US, a startling idea of an informal Quad on this side of the globe.
So, who was the elephant in the Zoom room this time? No prizes for guessing again. China. As China reorganises the world in her own image, from South Asia to Canada and Europe – via Israel and Gulf kingdoms like the UAE – it seems as if the US is gaining fuller clarity about its role as a big power, after having divested itself from its millstone called Afghanistan.