By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The Quad — the U.S., Japan, India and Australia — was conceived as a strategic coalition to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a concept articulated by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2016 and later elevated to a centerpiece of U.S. strategy. At stake was nothing less than preserving a rules-based order in the world’s most consequential region, which will shape the next global order.

Yet today, at the very moment when China’s coercive power is expanding, the Quad is sliding toward strategic irrelevance — undermined less by external pressure than by Washington’s own drift.

The irony is striking. It was President Trump who, in his first term, revived the Quad after a decade of dormancy and embedded it firmly in U.S. strategy. He replaced the Obama administration’s largely symbolic “pivot to Asia” with a hard-edged “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework, while decisively overturning four decades of U.S. policy toward Beijing by reclassifying China from partner to strategic rival. The Quad emerged as a central pillar of that shift.

Trump’s second term initially appeared to reinforce this trajectory. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on his first day in office, held a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting.

Successive administrations have acknowledged the reality that the Indo-Pacific is now the world’s economic and geopolitical center of gravity, and China — not Russia — poses the defining long-term challenge to U.S. power.  

Barack Obama announced a pivot to Asia in 2011 but failed to resource it adequately. Trump’s first term supplied strategic clarity. Joe Biden preserved the Trump-era framework, keeping the Quad intact and openly identifying China as America’s principal challenger. Yet Biden’s deep entanglement in the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts consumed attention, resources and political capital, leaving little room for a genuine Indo-Pacific pivot.

Trump returned to office pledging to resolve these conflicts and free up American bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific. But now the gap between rhetoric and policy has become glaring. His attempt to end the Ukraine war has stalled amid resistance from both Kyiv and Moscow, delaying any meaningful reallocation of U.S. military resources.

More damaging still, Trump has subordinated long-term strategy to short-term economic extraction, wielding tariffs and trade coercion as blunt instruments — even against allies critical to Indo-Pacific power equilibrium.

This approach is actively hollowing out the Quad. India today faces higher U.S. tariffs than China — an extraordinary outcome for a country Washington routinely describes as a key counterweight to the communist behemoth.

Japan, meanwhile, has been pressured into committing $550 billion in U.S. investments under terms that allow Washington to dictate how the funds are deployed and to claim the lion’s share of profits from the Japanese-financed projects. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conceded, Tokyo may have to strain its own balance sheet simply to comply.

Treating allies as revenue sources may generate short-term gains, but it corrodes trust and undermines collective strategy.

That self-inflicted damage is especially puzzling because stronger ties with India and Japan are not optional but indispensable. Strategically located on China’s opposite flanks, Japan and India represent Beijing’s most consequential regional counterweights.

Trump understood this in his first term, according India pride of place in U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy as the only Asian power with the demographic weight, geographic position, military capability and geopolitical heft to help balance China over the long run. That imperative has only grown with the consolidation of the China-Russia partnership.

Yet Trump’s second-term policies have instead alienated New Delhi. India was slated to host the Quad leaders’ summit in 2025. That prospect collapsed under the weight of Washington’s punitive trade measures. The result is a Quad that is adrift and increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy.

The warning signs are unmistakable. The Quad merits just a single, passing mention in the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy — buried in a brief reference to India. For a grouping once advertised as a cornerstone of the Indo-Pacific strategy, this near-expurgation is telling.

The Quad was never meant to be a talk shop or a disposable bargaining chip in U.S.-China relations. Its core purpose has always been to serve as a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and to uphold a stable Indo-Pacific balance of power.

Allowing it to wither through neglect and allies’ alienation risks vindicating Beijing’s long-standing contempt. When the Quad was first established, China’s foreign minister dismissed it as a fleeting, “headline-grabbing idea” that would dissipate like sea foam. Washington’s current trajectory threatens to prove him right.

It is not too late to avert that outcome. But doing so will require Washington to align economic policy with geopolitical priorities, treat allies as partners rather than profit centers, and restore the Quad to the center of its Indo-Pacific vision. Without such a course correction, the Quad’s existential crisis will deepen, eroding America’s own capacity to sustain a favorable balance of power in the defining region of the 21st century.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi should be a wake-up call for the United States: attempting to coerce India into actions that compromise its national interest is a recipe for estrangement. Given that India remains crucial to balance China’s aggressive rise, such an outcome would carry high costs for the US.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

At a time when US policy toward India has become distinctly punitive, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warm reception of Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi last week could not have been more pointed. Modi’s message was clear: India is a sovereign power that will not be dragooned into choosing sides in a widening rift between “the West and the rest.” Instead, it will continue to chart its own course in international affairs.

No major power is more vital to America’s long-term strategic interests than India. It is, after all, the only country with the population size, geographical position, and military might (including nuclear weapons) necessary to challenge China’s efforts to dominate Asia and ultimately supplant the United States as a global hegemon.

Ever since George W. Bush’s presidency, senior US officials have recognized the partnership with India as crucial to maintaining a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. This has never been mere rhetoric: over the last decade, US-India security ties have deepened rapidly, particularly in terms of military interoperability, intelligence cooperation, and technology exchanges.

Part of this progress occurred during US President Donald Trump’s first administration. As he ramped up pressure on China and cut security aid to Pakistan, Trump expanded cooperation with India, which stood at the center of his administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The result is evident today: India now conducts more military exercises with the US than with any other country, and the US has emerged as India’s largest trading partner.

But even as this process unfolded, the US gave India plenty of reason to be wary. Its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – which took place under President Joe Biden, but resulted from a deal cut earlier by Trump – raised serious doubts about the judgment and reliability of America’s leaders, as it effectively handed that country back to Taliban terrorists.

Concerns heightened in 2022, when the Biden administration helped Pakistan secure an International Monetary Fund bailout and then approved a $450 million deal to modernize the country’s US-supplied F-16 fleet, reviving in India bitter memories of America’s arming of Pakistan during the Cold War. Trump has intensified this embrace of Pakistan, not least in the interest of personal enrichment – highlighted by a lucrative cryptocurrency deal signed in April.

Although the US often disregarded India’s own interests, it nonetheless expected total loyalty when it came to enforcing sanctions on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But India – like other US allies such as Israel and Turkey – refused to comply, instead increasing purchases of discounted Russian oil. India saw no reason to sacrifice its national interests for a distant conflict, especially when the chief beneficiary of Western pressure on Russia was China.

India has seen this dynamic unfold before. When Trump reimposed harsh sanctions on Iran in 2019, India was deprived of one of its cheapest and most reliable energy sources, while China seized the opportunity to import Iranian crude at steep discounts and expand its security footprint there.

A similar pattern emerged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By isolating Russia from Western markets, sanctions effectively turned China into Russia’s economic lifeline, giving it leverage to strengthen its overland energy-supply routes from Russia. China now knows that, even if it moves against Taiwan, it will not lose access to Russian energy. While this trend undoubtedly undermines India’s strategic interests, at least this time India also took advantage of discounts on Russian oil.

The Trump administration, however, was not having it. It imposed an extra 25% tariff on US imports from India – raising total duties to 50% – and threatened secondary sanctions, claiming that India was undermining US efforts to counter “Russia’s harmful activities.” Yet Trump spared other major importers of Russian energy and even granted a sanctions exemption to Hungary, whose autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a close Trump ally. US tariffs on Indian goods now exceed those applied to Chinese exports. This is nothing short of a US economic war on India.

The US calls India indispensable, but treats its interests as peripheral. It wants India to serve as a pillar of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, but adopts policies that directly undercut India’s economic strength, regional security, and strategic autonomy. Trump’s foreign policy may be particularly erratic but the underlying pattern has spanned multiple administrations. The result is an increasingly embittered and mistrustful India that sees no choice but to hedge its bets by accelerating self-reliance and strengthening ties with alternative partners, beginning with Russia.

Putin’s visit to New Delhi should serve as a wake-up call for the US: coercion and inconsistency are a sure path to estrangement. A flexible, interest-driven “soft alliance” with India remains one of America’s few credible means of balancing China’s aggressive rise. In this sense, the US needs India more than India needs the US. Instead of trying to force India to “fall in line,” the US must rebuild the relationship by treating India as an equal partner. This means engaging with India as it is, not as American policymakers want it to be.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

The U.S. increasingly views China, not Russia, as this century’s defining challenge

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has mounted a renewed push to end the war in Ukraine — this time with greater preparation, clearer resolve and a heightened sense of urgency. By exploiting the winter lull in major ground offensives, it aims to force negotiated compromises and lock in a deal before the conflict enters its fifth year in February.

Part of the push reflects Trump’s vanity project as a self-styled global peacemaker. Addressing the United Nations in September, he boasted, “Everyone says that I should get a Nobel Peace Prize.”

But the deeper driver is strategic: a calculation that America’s long-term interests are better served by closing out a proxy war with Russia that no longer sits at the center of U.S. priorities. Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first sign of an emerging strategic recalibration in U.S. policy.

With U.S. policymakers increasingly focused on countering an ascendant China, the administration sees Russia as a declining economic power whose war in Ukraine has become a costly distraction for Washington, siphoning American attention and resources away from the far more consequential contest with Beijing. Ending the war on terms that stabilize Europe and strengthen America’s economic position is therefore a central objective.

This objective has led to dual-track pressure — compelling Kyiv to negotiate while forcing Moscow to bankroll both U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine and broader joint ventures. The result is a peace framework designed not only to stop a grinding war, but to make the postwar landscape financially rewarding for Washington.

Presently, America’s preoccupation with Ukraine hands China a strategic dividend: it dilutes U.S. deterrence in Asia, complicates alliance coordination and stretches a finite U.S. military-industrial capacity. Washington is already struggling to refill its own weapons stockpiles even as it arms both Ukraine and Israel.

Meanwhile, the brutal arithmetic of the battlefield is becoming impossible to gloss over. Ukraine’s manpower crunch in the military is deepening, its air defenses are fraying, it is still losing ground, and Western production lines cannot match Russia’s surging output. As a senior U.S. official has warned, Russia is now producing missiles faster than it can fire them — creating a rapidly expanding arsenal of long-range weapons that could, at some point, deliver a knockout blow to Ukraine.

For the U.S., whose defense resources are already overstretched, continuing to underwrite Ukraine’s war effort risks compromising its ability to counter China — a far larger, more capable and more ideologically driven challenger than Russia. A protracted war in Ukraine will erode America’s capacity to surge forces and sustain a high-intensity fight in the western Pacific, or even credibly signal to Beijing that it is fully prepared to defend Taiwan.

The implication is clear: a settlement needs to be reached soon, before the war’s trajectory tilts decisively against an already-bleeding Ukraine.

Critics of Trump’s peace push should heed the warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former spokesperson, Iuliia Mendel: “Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse — because we are losing.” It bears recalling that Ukraine and Russia nearly reached a settlement in Istanbul in April 2022 — a deal far more favorable to Kyiv than anything remotely attainable today. Yet, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance has noted, “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.”

America has seen this movie before. It spent 20 years waging war against the Taliban — and lost — because it refused to make difficult compromises when it still had leverage. The eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan was not only belated but humiliating.

Those now deriding efforts to end the Ukraine war should answer a simple question: What realistic alternative do they propose that Moscow could conceivably accept? If they cannot articulate one, then their objections amount to little more than wishful thinking dressed up as resolve.

The Trump administration’s peace plan is a hard-nosed attempt to realign Western strategy with long-term geopolitical realities — above all, the need to shift focus to the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s strategic center of gravity. The proposed course may be unsettling, but it reflects a basic truth: The era of limitless American bandwidth is over. And Washington’s underlying calculation is unmistakable — China, not Russia, is the defining challenge of the 21st century.

Whether the plan succeeds, however, depends on factors far beyond Kyiv’s control. Its viability hinges on Moscow’s willingness to accept a settlement at a moment when it holds the battlefield advantage. Putin may well decide that time favors Russia: that pressing the military offensive and intensifying the pressure on Ukraine could extract even larger concessions down the road.

Whatever its eventual fate, the peace plan sends a clear signal to allies and adversaries alike: American strategy is entering a new phase. For Europe, this may feel like an unwelcome jolt of reality. For China, it is a warning that Washington intends to reclaim the initiative in the Indo-Pacific. And for Ukraine, it is a sobering reminder that even the most committed patron ultimately reshapes its commitments to serve its own core interests.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Brahma Chellaney, The Globe and Mail

President Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace plan has triggered sharp reactions in Kyiv and across Europe – and the backlash is revealing.

At its core, the plan represents a direct effort to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the negotiating table and toward concessions he has consistently resisted. But the proposal now taking shape also places significant demands on Moscow – concessions designed to make any peace deal financially lucrative for a commercially minded Trump administration. Beyond enshrining in law a Russian policy of non-aggression toward Europe and Ukraine, the version of the plan put forward by Mr. Trump last week proposed that Russia would allow US$100-billion of its Western-frozen central bank reserves to be funnelled into a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. Washington would pocket 50 per cent of the profits from that venture. The remaining frozen Russian assets, totalling over US$200-billion, would be shifted into a separate U.S.-Russia investment vehicle tasked with executing joint projects.

More fundamentally, America’s urgency to end the conflict reflects a strategic recalibration: the proxy war with Russia no longer advances core U.S., Canadian or even European interests.

In fact, the grinding war in Europe distracts the U.S. from a far more consequential challenge: an increasingly assertive China determined to displace America as the world’s pre-eminent power. If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strained the international order, a Chinese assault on Taiwan could shatter it altogether. And the longer the West continues to pour resources into Ukraine, the greater the risk becomes that Beijing calculates it has a window to throttle Taiwan via coercion, a blockade or a rapid fait accompli.

An America tied down in Europe clearly serves Chinese President Xi Jinping’s globally expansionist ambitions.

Yet Mr. Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, shut the door on diplomacy with Moscow and embraced an open-ended pledge to support Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” At the 2023 G7 summit, the U.S., Canada and other member states doubled down by issuing maximalist conditions – including the total, unconditional withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory. That outcome was implausible then, and is today even further removed from reality.

The U.S.-led “hybrid war” strategy – weaponizing sanctions and global financial systems – has not weakened Russia enough to change the battlefield. Russia has dug in and annexed the territory it holds, and continues to make battlefield gains. Ukraine, even with major Western weapons supplies, lacks the capability to defeat its stronger enemy on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Russian aerial attacks are inflicting ever-greater destruction on Ukraine. Worse still for Kyiv, replenishing exhausted and depleted front-line forces is becoming increasingly difficult as a growing number of draft-eligible men flee to European Union countries to avoid being sent to the trenches.

The war has also exposed troubling Western military weaknesses. Western munitions stockpiles are being depleted much faster than they can be replenished. America’s weapons-manufacturing capacity remains too limited for the demands of long-term great-power competition.

A protracted war, meanwhile, accelerates the deepening partnership between Russia and China. Since 2022, Beijing has become Moscow’s indispensable financial and industrial lifeline, buying up discounted Russian oil and gas, supplying key electronics and components, and helping the Kremlin circumvent sanctions. A de facto Eurasian axis is emerging, with China as its central pillar.

This is the strategic backdrop against which Mr. Trump’s peace proposal should be understood. The plan seeks to compel Kyiv to negotiate not because Ukraine’s cause is unworthy, but because the war’s continuation is increasingly antithetical to Western interests.Video 2:29

Critics claim that a settlement with Moscow would only embolden China’s expansionism. But Mr. Xi does not need lessons in opportunism from Russia. China’s own cost-free expansion – from the South China Sea to the Himalayas – already shows that it advances when it sees little pushback. What would truly embolden Beijing is an overstretched U.S., hollowed-out munitions stockpiles, and a distracted Indo-Pacific strategy.

For the U.S., the path forward is clear. A negotiated settlement is the only realistic way to end the war. A conflict continuing indefinitely serves neither Ukraine’s long-term security nor NATO’s. Ending it would free up Western bandwidth, rebuild critical stockpiles, and allow Washington to shift attention to the Indo-Pacific, the world’s emerging economic and geopolitical hub that will likely shape the new global order.

Mr. Trump’s peace plan accepts the reality that it is in America’s own interest to help bring this war to an end sooner rather than later. A diplomatic settlement would also serve Canadians well by reducing economic burdens, lowering the risk of a wider NATO conflict, and enabling Ottawa to focus on the Indo-Pacific, where Canada’s long-term interests increasingly lie.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Transformed into a tool of geopolitical domination, U.S. trade policy sows the seeds for backlash

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

For U.S. President Donald Trump, trade diplomacy has become less about markets and more about American might. By weaponizing tariffs, sanctions and investment rules, he has turned trade policy into a tool of coercive statecraft — one that seeks to realign global power relationships in favor of America’s short-term geopolitical goals.

Trump’s approach treats trade as subservient to geopolitical strategy. Tariffs and threats of economic punishment are deployed as geopolitical levers not only against adversaries such as China and Russia but also against allies like Canada, India, Japan and Mexico. His administration even invoked a national emergency to justify using tariffs as a coercive instrument, underscoring how far the traditional lines between economics and security have blurred under Trump.

During his Tokyo visit late last month, Trump praised Japan’s pledge to buy “a very large amount of U.S. military equipment,” adding that “we very much appreciate the trade.” The remark revealed a profound transformation in international economic relations. Under Trump, bilateral trade agreements no longer revolve around tariffs or market access. They have become political contracts to secure vast foreign investments and military purchases, binding allies into Washington’s orbit and curtailing their policy autonomy.

The scale is striking. Japan has committed $550 billion, South Korea $350 billion and Malaysia $70 billion in U.S. investments, while Southeast Asian partners have agreed to buy American aircraft, weapons and energy products worth tens of billions. The Japan deal even allows Trump to decide how Tokyo’s money is invested and grants Washington 90% of profits once Japan recoups its outlay. As U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conceded, Japan would have to “blow up their balance sheet” and borrow money to meet the obligations.

Such arrangements amount to economic vassalage disguised as partnership. Japan bears the debt burden and financial risk while the U.S. captures the profits and dictates deployment of capital according to its strategic priorities, rather than commercial logic. Trade diplomacy under Trump has effectively become an instrument for extracting tribute in the guise of cooperation.

Trade has also turned into a selective punishment tool. India has been singled out for secondary U.S. sanctions over its Russian oil imports, even as the European Union, Japan and Turkey continue major Russian energy purchases. The EU has been given a comfortable transition period until January 2028 to phase out Russian energy — a timeline unlikely to hold if the Ukraine war ends earlier. The inconsistency exposes Trump’s trade coercion as driven by geopolitics, not principle.

Sanctions and tariff threats now serve as levers of intimidation to extract concessions through fear of economic harm. This form of “negotiation” allows Washington to tilt deals decisively in its favor, securing asymmetric outcomes that entrench dependence. The approach underscores a revival and global extension of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.

The line between economic diplomacy and interference in other nations’ domestic affairs has also blurred. Trump has linked his 50% tariffs against Brazil since July to the legal proceedings against former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. And in Argentina, Trump conditioned a $20 billion American aid lifeline — one of the largest to any country since World War II — on the success of President Javier Milei’s party in the recent legislative elections. Trump’s success there can only embolden similar tactics elsewhere.

Recent U.S. trade deals with Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam signed during Trump’s recent Kuala Lumpur visit illustrate the fusion of commercial and security goals. In exchange for Washington lifting tariff threats, these nations accepted economic and strategic concessions aligned with U.S. interests. The Cambodia deal even included lifting a long-standing arms embargo and resuming joint military drills, marking a full integration of defense and trade policy.

Each of Trump’s trade deals shares the same blueprint: partner nations make concrete economic and strategic commitments, while the U.S. retains both significant tariff barriers and the power to adjust or revoke terms unilaterally. The accords extend well beyond traditional trade matters to encompass investment quotas, defense-procurement obligations, critical-minerals cooperation and compliance with American sanctions and export-control policies. Defense procurement commitments, for example, will deepen technological dependence on U.S. weapons systems, making it ever harder for partners to pursue independent security policies.

For countries heavily reliant on U.S. markets, the choice is stark: accept constrained sovereignty in return for economic access, or resist and face punishment. Worse still, the new agreements lack the legal grounding and bipartisan consensus that once lent durability to American trade pacts. They are politically fragile and inherently imbalanced.

By treating allies less as partners than as instruments of leverage, Trump is corroding the foundations of alliance solidarity. Overtly coercive and transactional trade relationships breed resentment and erode the trust that sustains long-term cooperation. Allies begin to see engagement with Washington not as an expression of shared interests but as participation in a protection racket: pay the tribute or face economic retribution.

The inevitable consequence is blowback. Nations are already hedging against overdependence on the U.S. by diversifying trade and defense ties with other powers. The perception of America as an unreliable and self-serving partner is accelerating the global shift toward multipolarity. Ironically, Trump’s efforts to consolidate U.S. dominance are hastening its erosion.

In many ways, Trump’s model of weaponized trade diplomacy resembles China’s Belt and Road Initiative — only more unabashedly coercive. While Beijing used loans and infrastructure projects to bind partners, Washington now employs tariffs, sanctions and investment dictates. Yet just as China’s debt-trap diplomacy provoked geopolitical backlash, Trump’s heavy-handed economic unilateralism is likely to face mounting resistance.

By overplaying America’s economic might, Trump risks undermining its global leadership. Coercion can yield short-term compliance but it destroys the mutual confidence and reciprocity that sustain long-term influence. The paradox is unmistakable: the more the U.S. weaponizes its economic power, the faster the world will adapt to limit its reach. In the end, America’s own overreach could prove the greatest driver of the multipolar world order Trump seeks to resist.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.