Sparks: Indo-Pacific security in focus as US, India, Japan and Australia ministers meet

The diplomats speak of common purpose while their hands, resting on the polished table, remain perfectly still.

The preliminary meeting to establish the agenda for the preliminary meeting has been indefinitely postponed.

To call an alliance an alliance when its members do not act in concert is to begin with a false name.

You need no minister to tell you that four flags flying together cast a longer shadow than one.

Beneath their speeches about collective security lies the simple, ancient fear of a rising power.

This operational sequence of diplomatic inputs could, if properly programmed, generate an output of genuine cooperation.

Observe how the geometry of their alliance mirrors the structural tension in a bird's wing before flight.

Their insistence on unity betrays a deep-seated anxiety about the very fractures they cannot acknowledge.

Elegant things: the precise alignment of four flags, the unspoken understanding that they will never fly as one.

They speak of defending freedom while building a fence that keeps some people in and others out.

A dispute over territory masquerades as a debate over principles, confusing the domain of power with that of right.

This political imbalance manifests as a fever in the body politic, a humoral disorder requiring a balancing tincture.

Their common sense is the consent manufactured to make the architecture of their power seem natural and inevitable.