The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, outlined the approach of the Trump administration towards the Indo-Pacific in the following terms: “...the era of the United States subsidising the defence of wealthy nations is over. We need partners, not protectorates. We seek alliances built on shared responsibility, not dependency... Alliances only work when they are true partnerships. It is a two-way street. You don't have a strong alliance unless everyone has skin in the game. No freeloading. Alliances are not judged by the number of flags, but by the number of formations. We don't need more conferences. We need more combat power. I'm sorry to say this here: less Shangri-La, more ships, more subs”.
The question, therefore, is where does it leave the Quad given that a new Anglo-Saxon military alliance called AUKUS exists concurrently?
It was the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer who first gave cartographic coherence to the Indo-Pacific in the 1920s, though his vision-one in which Japan, China, and India, liberated from colonial domination, would align with Germany against Anglo-American imperialism. It bears no resemblance to the contemporary Quad. The current construct was christened, if not conceptualised, by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Within eleven months of assuming the premiership in September 2006, during an address ‘Confluence of Two Seas’ to the Indian Parliament, he mooted the idea of the Indian and Pacific Oceans being a single, interlocking strategic space where freedom and prosperity would be mutually reinforcing. That vision became the philosophical load-bearing beam upon which Quadrilateral Security Dialogue would be constructed.
Quad's first iteration collapsed as early as 2008 itself. Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith undercut the grouping during a visit to Beijing in February 2008. The Kevin Rudd government also withdrew from Malabar naval exercise, a decision that would not be reversed until 2020.
The decades that followed saw Beijing's belligerence exacerbate not only in the high Himalayas but also in the South China Sea. The expansion of its naval reach into the Indian Ocean, coupled with the Belt and Road Initiative as an instrument of geo-economic dominance, fundamentally altered the strategic calculus of all four Quad members.
The grouping reconvened on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Manila in 2017, although the four nations issued separate press releases rather than a joint statement. Two years later, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, Quad held its first ministerial-level meeting. Australia rejoined the Malabar exercise. In March 2021, Quad leaders met virtually at the first leaders’ summit and issued a joint statement titled ‘The Spirit of the Quad’. Since then, there have been three leaders’ summits and multiple ministerial meetings.
At the 2026 meeting in New Delhi, the Quad foreign ministers agreed substantively to augment regional maritime domain awareness through the Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration, a mechanism that appears to be the most operationally tangible initiative the Quad has produced so far.
To understand what Quad is requires a willingness to resist both the overclaiming of its proponents and the casual dismissal of its detractors. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi likened Quad to "sea foam,” suggesting it would dissipate as quickly as it had appeared, he was perhaps engaging in performative posturing. The sea foam has not evaporated. But it would be equally misleading to characterise Quad as a nascent Asian Nato.
The paradox at the heart of Quad is that it seeks to uphold a rules-based order through a need-based, preference-driven form of engagement. Quad operates through convergence rather than obligation. It can facilitate, coordinate, and signal, but it cannot compel or guarantee. For a grouping whose object is to ensure freedom of navigation throughout the Indo-Pacific, these limitations are not trivial.
Oxymoronically, the case for Quad's strategic utility is stronger than its critics acknowledge. The hub-and-spoke security architecture that the US has historically maintained in Asia, connecting Washington bilaterally to Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra and Manila, while those spokes maintained relatively limited direct connections with one another, was always more brittle than it appeared.
What can perhaps emerge from Quad's existence is something more resilient: a networked security architecture in which US allies and partners develop direct, deepening relationships with one another, sharing situational awareness, conducting exercises, and aligning diplomatic positions in ways that do not depend entirely on the unsteady anchor of American commitment.
Quad could provide India access to advanced technological cooperation with three of the world's most innovation-intensive economies. The US leads the world in AI research and patent filings; Japan is a global pioneer in robotics and precision manufacturing; Australia has emerged as a significant node in quantum computing research. India, with its vast and rapidly maturing digital infrastructure and a technologically skilled workforce, offers resilient technology supply chains.
Quad's working groups on critical emerging technologies—semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, clean energy and next-generation telecommunications—are central to the grouping's long-term strategic significance. Quad's capacity to coordinate technology governance, standards-setting and supply chain resilience may prove more consequential than a naval exercise.
Concurrently, the Blue Dot Network, launched by the US, Japan and Australia in 2019, is a quality standards framework for infrastructure investment that offers a market-based alternative to China’s debt-laden and opaque Belt Road Initiative (BRI). The Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, a joint Japan-India initiative launched in 2017, represents another strand of this counter-BRI architecture. Quad's non-military public goods agenda is its principal instrument for regional legitimacy, helping it gain the goodwill and strategic orientation of the middle- and smaller-sized Indo-Pacific powers.
Quad's most immediate challenge is that the national perspectives amongst Quad members do not naturally converge; they require constant diplomatic cultivation, the highest-order agenda management, and the kind of sustained political investment that can survive a change of guard in any of the four capitals.
The trajectory forward is clear enough, even if the political will to follow it remains unevenly distributed. Quad requires something architecturally more robust than the current summit-driven, working-group-dependent mode. It requires permanent secretariat-level coordination, measurable deliverables, and predictable funding commitments. It must deepen its engagement with more Indo-Pacific nations to build a broader coalition of stakeholders whose active alignment with a free and open Indo-Pacific is ultimately indispensable to the realisation of that vision.
America is beating a retreat globally in the name of strategic realism. It is no longer willing to shoulder the responsibility as the single biggest outside balancer of power. The Thucydides Trap that Xi Jinping alluded to is closing portentously. The middle powers must get their act together.
Manish Tewari | MP, lawyer, former Union I&B minister and author of A World Adrift
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)
