I kinda agree that the Quad is a scam job. Its not going to protect India one bit. If India starts a foolish war with China over Ladakh. Would the other 3 of the Quad wanna risk WW3 with China? Anything they can think of doing on China on India's behalf will be too much a price to pay in terms of lives and economy.
The Quad as I see it is a manipulation to get India to be the useful idiot to fight it out with China. The US, Japan, and Australia can 'cheerlead' India, while laughing from behind at its stupidity to doing them a favour to hurt China, but at the same time killing its own future.
If the Quad's plan (or whatever other containment strategy) is going to work, it will ONLY work if it is a threat to China's strategic vulnerabilities.
What is strategic vulnerabilities for huge and powerful countries like China? Well, it's usually something systematic and on the civilizational level.
Containment strategy in the Cold War worked for USSR, only because the USSR's dogmatic communistic ideology prevent them from taking advantage of market-economy oriented global trade. The Soviets themselves isolates themselves from a global trade system. This is why containment strategy works, because in this matter, the USSR and the USA both "agree" upon isolating the USSR.
This renders USSR a systematic vulnerability in their inability to build a booming and more robust civilian industrial bases to vastly increase the living standard of the Soviet people, compare to the West. And the containment strategy of Cold War only adds oil to fire.
In China's case, it is already proven that
economic containment strategy is NOT going to work. Today is not the early 50s and 60s., no leader in China today and in the foreseeable future will even think about self-isolation, nor could they be isolated. Globalism is already here, and China is already in it, you simply can not shut her out. So
economics and trade is NOT China's vulnerability.
In my opinion, it should be apparent that
land warfare of scale is also NOT China's vulnerability. Because China is a huge continental power, she will always have a hugely powerful army even if they are doing nothing (just sitting around and training) as a result of lacking a real opponent. Even India is not really the appropriate opponent for PLAGF. PLAGF is theoretically most suited to fight the army of the USSR (had she still existed). But sadly, USSR is gone forever. Today's Russia could be 4 times stronger, and still not be as threatening to China as the USSR, because Russian Federation do NOT contain Central Asia.
To me, the high profile existence of the Quad is almost unreal because it is like China's wildest wet dream.
It basically gave the PLAGF an excuse to make fighting India an effective way of countering the maritime containment strategy of the US. Those two thing were unrelated, until the US put them together in a nice little package called the Quad. Now the PLAGF will no longer be an overly energetic pit bull with nothing to bite on, in Chinese, I would say "终于有用武之地了，不用再‘将军老死、战马肥死'了" to summarize this situation.
China's ultimate goal is to break the cage which the Anglo-American Western world order had put upon the world through the Core-periphery system of global division of labor. This is China's cause, and it makes fighting a non-allied India contrary to the cause. If India is to break her non-allied stance and join the US-led West in Asia, it will only be a juicy opportunity for China to start a land war with India for the aforementioned cause. The opposite is true for the Cold War against USSR, because for USSR's case, all those industrial capacity given to producing weapons were a waste of money, because the USA was fighting and winning the economic war that eventually made the USSR collapsed.
USSR's cause should be to preserve and spread communist/socialist way of life, which could only be done if they can demonstrate that USSR's planned economy is booming and prosperous, and produces abundance for the soviet people to consume. This would be demonstrated by very low cost of living and very high income, thus making a more competitive standard of living compare to the west. The soviet military should ONLY be used as a safe guard to protect such way of life against an enemy that wants to destroy it by force.
As for your concern about the US starting WW3. it actually doesn't matter. The US will only start WW3 if they calculated that it is in their benefit to start WW3. That's NOT the case today, because the USA has much more to lose than China, in at least the next 30 years. And if it is the case that the USA calculated that WW3 is their best bet, they still will NOT opt for a Quad.
Because Quad is an emotionally reassuring mechanism. Given the Indians the promise of a Quad, only makes them feel more secure and reassured. This will make the Indians less likely to go all out with everything they have, especially when the war hasn't really started yet. The more options the Indians have, they more likely they will pick the option with the least cost. This is NOT how you drag China into the quagmire of war via India. This is creating a perfect opportunity for China to take the Indians by surprise and get a swift victory. In Chinese we call this "懈怠对手", making them less alerted and more slack, making them over-confident.
In Sun Tzu's Art of War, there is that famous theory of ”置之于死地而后生“, putting your men in a dire situation with no route of escape, and this will activate their latent and innate potentials. You might want to think about this.
