The Quad is dead; long live the Quad

There has been intense speculation over the future of the Quad. The foreign ministers of Japan, India, Australia and the United States met last Tuesday in New Delhi. The series of major initiatives launched during the meeting were designed to show that rumours of its death were exaggerated. Was it, really?

Before I tackle that question, let me take you to a particular exchange that took place when Donald Trump connected to Sergio Gor via phone in New Delhi during an event staged by the US embassy to mark 250 years of US independence. The exchange has stayed with me given the context and what has happened since Trump returned to the Oval Office last year. I am quoting the transcript from the readout released by the US Department of State.

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AMBASSADOR GOR: Good evening. All right. Before I give my speech, I just got a call from a special guest who’s on the line. Can you hear us, Mr. President? (Cheers.)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: (Via phone) I can hear you. I love India. I love India. So I know you’re there, and I hope you make a good speech. You have to be representative of our country, Sergio. But I just want to say hello to everybody. I love the prime minister. Modi is great. He’s my friend. (Cheers.)

And I just want to say a very, very good evening to everybody. It’s morning here, it’s evening there. And I just want to say you’re great, and we’ve never been closer to India, and India can count on me 100 percent and our country. If they ever need help, they know where to call. They call right here. We’re doing well. We’re setting records. We have a record economy, a record stock market. And anything India wants, they get. And I’m a big, big fan of Prime Minister Modi. (Cheers.)

I found the attitude of the US president grotesque, over the top and condescending. But the problem lay not in the attitude alone. It was obvious that he was seeking to mend ties after causing grievous damage to the US-India relationship for over a year through coercive, unilateral measures that ate away at the foundation of bilateral ties. His audacity was astounding!

Trump made life difficult for India in two distinct ways. At one end were policies, actions and insults directed at India to bring New Delhi to heel. He imposed the highest tariffs and secondary sanctions to force India into abandoning Russian crude at a great cost to its energy security. Along with his trade war, Trump and his colleagues kept up a steady stream of insults and pejorative remarks to pepper the pain with humiliation.

The perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack on India in recent times, Pakistani military dictator Asim Munir, got a rockstar’s reception at the Trump White House, with the president hosting him for lunch and calling him his “favourite field marshal”. Well may India try to isolate Pakistan, under Trump, the mothership of terror is basking in newfound glory and has become a key mediator in the US-Iran conflict.

To add to India’s woes, Trump, who came to power promising to tackle illegal immigration, has turned against legal immigration with gusto, endangering one of the key drivers of US-India ties: the people-to-people relationship. Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration policies have hit Indians the hardest by seeking to close their pathway to work and live in the US. His recent green card policy came on top of last year’s restrictions on the H-1B skilled visa programme, whose top beneficiaries were Indian workers.

Trump also withdrew the waiver for use of Chabahar port in Iran, allowed his base a free run to target Indians with racist insults and, crucially, railed against US companies seeking to invest in India, and warmed up to China with a sharp pivot that weakened a core strategic alignment: preventing Beijing from establishing regional hegemony and ensuring a free, open and multipolar Indo-Pacific.

Along with these targeted actions, India was also at the receiving end of unintended consequences. Trump’s ill-judged military offensive against Iran has dealt a fell blow to India’s macro stability by triggering a severe crisis in both energy and food security.

Incredibly, Trump thought that after dealing all these blows and single-handedly cratering a relationship built over several decades by leaders from both sides, all he needed to do was send Marco Rubio on a repair mission and launch a charm offensive over the phone that sounded phoney and insincere. It isn’t just the fact that there is a disconnect in ties; what is apparent is that the Trump administration seems unable to grasp the nature of the problem.

Which brings me to my larger point. For a US president bent on resource extraction from allies and partners through economic coercion instead of long-term strategic alignment, for whom every partnership is a zero-sum game to further America’s fortunes and security at the expense of others, it is impossible for Trump to be a sincere partner in a joint framework that was conceived as the democratic world’s premier strategic bulwark against an assertive China.

The Quad foreign ministers’ meeting belted out an impressive array of initiatives and pacts. There was the decision to jointly build a port in Fiji and agreements covering critical minerals and energy security. The partners announced the formation of the first-ever ‘Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration’ initiative to enhance information-sharing and maritime domain awareness.

The ‘Critical Minerals Initiative Framework’ may yield leverage in economic policy tools and coordinate investment to strengthen critical minerals supply chains. The initiative on energy security is expected to identify areas of cooperation in technology, management, policy, international market analysis and emergency response exercises.

The joint statement identified China (without naming the country) as the malignant actor destabilising the East China Sea and the South China Sea through “unilateral actions including by force or coercion that threaten peace and stability in the region”. The document expressed “serious concerns regarding dangerous and coercive actions, including interference with offshore resource development, the repeated obstruction of freedom of navigation and overflight, and the dangerous manoeuvres by military aircraft and coast guard and maritime militia vessels, especially the unsafe use of water cannons and flares, and ramming or blocking actions in the South China Sea. We are seriously concerned by the militarisation of disputed features.”

The issue is not the number of initiatives launched or whether the bureaucracies are engaged throughout the year. The recently held meeting focused on a series of practical, non-ideological programmes.

The problem is Trump. He is too fascinated and overawed by Xi Jinping to be a key member of a strategic alignment that seeks to shape China’s behaviour, and under him the United States has veered towards a conciliatory approach to Beijing that upends the very grammar of the Quad.

For nearly a decade, US defence posture was predicated on the premise that China represented a revisionist, systemic, pacing threat to the international order and the US. However, the late-2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) and the subsequent January 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) engineered a clear deviation.

The 2025 NSS declared that economic interests constitute the “ultimate stakes” of national security. Rather than framing Beijing as an existential rival, the strategy prioritised a “mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing”, pushing trade rebalancing over systemic containment.

This shift was formalised in the 2026 NDS, which demoted China to “line of effort 2”, by calling for deterring China in the Indo-Pacific “through strength, not confrontation”.

Prima facie, there is nothing wrong with the strategy. Except under Trump, even a strategy document released by his own administration is not worth the paper it is printed on.

The NDS declared that “President Trump’s most important direction for the Department is peace through strength. Recognising this, it is our essential responsibility at DoW (Department of War) to ensure that President Trump is always able to negotiate from a position of strength in order to sustain peace in the Indo-Pacific. To that end, as the NSS directs, we will build, posture and sustain a strong denial defence along the FIC. We will also work closely with our allies and partners in the region to incentivise and enable them to do more for our collective defence, especially in ways that are relevant to an effective denial defence.”

After promising to “work closely with allies”, Trump went to Beijing, met Xi, and discussed arms sales to Taiwan in “great detail” in violation of the “Six Assurances”, a longstanding US commitment never to consult Beijing on such matters.

A New York Times report points out that in 1982, the US “broadened its support of Taiwan with a document known as the Six Assurances, one of which said Washington ‘has not agreed to consult with’ China on arms sales to Taiwan.” The newspaper notes that when Trump was asked about the 1982 commitment, he appeared to downplay its relevance. “Well, I think the 1980s is a long way… That’s a big, far distance.”

Trump has also expressed doubts about coming to Taiwan’s rescue if China attacks the island. “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away. I think that’s the last thing we need.”

Nothing illustrates Trump’s transactional approach to the Indo-Pacific more vividly than his handling of Taiwan arms sales. A bipartisan US Congress approved a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan in January 2026, but it has been languishing in the US State Department ever since, held hostage to Trump’s desire for a warm summit with Xi Jinping. When pressed, Trump described the package as “a very good negotiating chip” with China — a phrase that encapsulates his entire Indo-Pacific philosophy. Latest reports say the decision has been “paused”.

This strategic prevarication has fuelled deep US scepticism in Taiwan, and signalled to Quad partners that the US is transactional, lacks commitment and may renegotiate key positions on a dime.

What we saw in New Delhi was an effort by Quad foreign ministers to transition the Quad into a loose, techno-economic coalition focused on regional public goods. That doesn’t go far enough. An international strategic alignment — where a key member pivots from systemic geopolitical rivalry with China to a policy of strategic accommodation and transactional bilateralism — cannot survive on bureaucratic momentum alone.

It requires a unifying ideological purpose. The Quad was not conceived as a generic regional development agency such as the UNDP. It was conceived as a democratic bulwark forged specifically to counter China’s systemic revisionism and maritime assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. This shared recognition of an existential threat is the glue holding four democracies together.

Without this explicit ideological mooring, the Quad’s sprawling list of non-traditional initiatives — from vaccine distribution, satellite tracking, clean energy partnerships, undersea cable deployments to an Indo-Pacific logistics network — loses its strategic coherence. Deprived of a clear geopolitical mandate, the Quad’s deliverables appear less like a grand strategy and more like an expensive duplication of existing multilateral bodies.

This is exactly why a leaders’ summit is important. It gives the Quad strategic direction, an ideological anchor and explicit commitment. It seems the framework will be downgraded to a foreign minister-level grouping, primarily because Trump has lost interest.

The Quad isn’t dead. But it is badly in need of leadership.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)