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.”