When the foreign ministers of India, Japan, Australia, and the United States gathered in New Delhi for a recent photo op, the smiles looked forced. It wasn’t just the summer heat. The image captured something deeper: a once-promising strategic partnership struggling to find its footing as its most powerful member appears to be drifting away. This Quad identity crisis threatens the very foundation of the alliance.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, was never a formal treaty alliance. It was more of a like-minded club, built around a shared concern: the rise of China. But in the world of geopolitics, shared concern only holds things together for so long. When the United States under President Donald Trump began signaling a pivot away from the Asia-Pacific — toward trade deals with Beijing and military operations in the Middle East — the foundation started to crack.
A Coalition Without a Captain: The Quad Identity Crisis
For nearly two decades, the Quad has served as a forum for coordinating strategy in the Indo-Pacific. But structural weaknesses have always been there. There is no binding mutual defense clause, no permanent staff, no formal treaty. It has relied on political will and personal relationships. Right now, both are in short supply.
No Quad leaders’ summit has been held in over a year. President Trump has never attended one. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi hasn’t either. The group has essentially been leaderless at the top. Analysts describe the New Delhi meeting as a last-ditch effort — damage control, really — to agree on a summit date before irrelevance sets in.
Umi Ariga, an analyst at the Japan Institute for International Affairs, put it bluntly: the Quad has been pursuing low-risk initiatives like vaccine distribution and supply chain resilience. “These are worthwhile, but they are second-order achievements for a grouping conceived as a strategic bulwark,” she said.
When the Protector Becomes the Question Mark
The real worry isn’t just missed summits. It’s about trust. When the United States redeployed warships from the Asia-Pacific to the Middle East during operations against Iran, allies in Tokyo and New Delhi took notice. When Trump visited Beijing for the first time by a U.S. president in nearly a decade — just months after those redeployments — the message was clear: Washington’s priorities had shifted.
For Japan, the optics were especially jarring. Tokyo saw the removal of U.S. forces from its territory as a direct reduction of its own security buffer at a time when China was conducting large-scale military exercises around Taiwan. Prime Minister Takaichi placed a call to Trump within days of the Beijing summit. The speed of that call revealed a deep anxiety.
“The troop redeployment and the Beijing summit together create compounding perception risks,” Ariga said.
Beijing’s Reading of the Room
China’s strategists have been watching all of this with a mix of relief and calculation. Einar Tangen, a Beijing-based political analyst, said that for years, China viewed the Quad as a potential “Asian NATO” in the making. But that assessment has evolved.
“Beijing’s assessment of the Quad has shifted from seeing it as a unified anti-China coalition to recognizing it as a structurally uneven alignment,” Tangen said. “China increasingly doubts whether the four countries share the same long-term strategic vision.”
Tangen argued that after Trump seemed eager to stabilize relations with Beijing, Washington suddenly needed to convince its partners it hadn’t abandoned the Indo-Pacific. Rubio’s trip to India was, in Beijing’s view, a scramble born of anxiety. “From Beijing’s perspective, Rubio’s trip reveals Washington’s underlying anxiety,” he said. “If the Quad was fully confident, reassurance would not be necessary.”
China gave Trump ceremony and symbolism in Beijing but not the strategic concessions he wanted. That asymmetry matters, Tangen said, because it explains why Rubio was dispatched to reassure India, Japan, and Australia that the Quad still matters.
An Original Insight: The Paradox of Fear-Based Alliances
There’s a paradox at the heart of the Quad’s current crisis that the original reporting only hints at. Alliances built primarily on fear of a common adversary are inherently fragile — not because the fear is unfounded, but because fear alone cannot sustain long-term cooperation. It can’t fund a secretariat, it can’t compel a president to attend a summit, and it can’t prevent one partner from cutting its own deal with the very adversary the alliance was meant to counter.
What the Quad lacks is a positive vision. What does it stand for, beyond opposing China? In Southeast Asia, many countries have spent years practicing what diplomats call “hedging” — maintaining good relations with all major powers. The Quad, by contrast, was built on a bet that the U.S. would remain the dominant power in the region indefinitely. That bet is now looking shaky, and the anxiety is palpable.
If the Quad is to survive, it needs to answer a fundamental question: What is the purpose of this group when its leading member is simultaneously seeking accommodation with the power it was designed to check? Until that question is answered, the Quad will remain a forum in search of a reason to exist.
What Comes Next?
For now, the Quad continues to function at the working level. Maritime domain awareness projects and vaccine initiatives are still moving forward. But the strategic silence at the top is deafening. As U.S. forces leave the region and as Washington courts Beijing, the partners left behind are starting to hedge their own bets. Japan is building up its own defense capabilities. India is deepening its ties with Russia. Australia is watching closely.
Trump’s National Security Strategy, released in late 2025, mentioned the Quad exactly once. Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s just another sign that the alliance is drifting — not because it has failed, but because its leader has looked away. For more on how global tensions are stress-testing multilateral systems, read Global Tensions Are Stress-Testing the System Designed to Prevent World War III. Also, explore the broader implications of US foreign policy in Global Trust Deficit: Why the UN’s Founding Promise Is Fraying at the Edges. For further reading on alliance dynamics, see What Is the Quad? from the Council on Foreign Relations and The Quad’s Identity Crisis from the Lowy Institute.
