The Quad’s main challenge comes from America’s strategic drift, rather than from China

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

As U.S. President Donald Trump pivots from confronting China to selectively accommodating it, America’s Quad strategic coalition with Japan, India and Australia is becoming increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy and is at risk of strategic irrelevance unless the grouping restores coherence, commitment and purpose.

The Quad was once projected as the democratic world’s strategic answer to China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. It was conceived as a strategic alliance to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” the vision advanced by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and later adopted as a central pillar of U.S. strategy.

Today, however, the Quad is losing strategic relevance. The upcoming Quad foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi is unlikely to arrest this drift or restore momentum to a grouping that appears ever more directionless.

Increasingly, the Quad resembles a Potemkin alliance — outwardly intact but hollow at its core.

The signs of drift are unmistakable. No Quad leaders summit has been held since 2024.

In his first term, Trump revived the Quad after a decade of dormancy and made it central to U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, a priority his second term initially appeared to confirm when Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened a Quad foreign ministers meeting on his first day in office.

But the grouping’s momentum has visibly slowed as Washington’s China policy has fundamentally shifted.

The shift, highlighted by Trump’s visit this month to Beijing, began after the president’s sky-high tariffs on China prompted Beijing in April last year to halt most exports of rare-earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech civilian and military production. China’s weaponization of its near-monopoly on rare-earth minerals forced Washington to negotiate a truce.

That accommodation has since deepened. The economic and geopolitical fallout from Trump’s Iran war has further weakened his hand, including by aggravating stagflationary pressures at home. With the U.S. still dependent on China-controlled supply chains due to the failed “decoupling” strategy of Trump’s first term, Washington needs a cooperative Beijing to keep inflation from spiraling and to discourage Chinese unloading of U.S. Treasury holdings, especially as U.S. borrowing rises.

To make matters worse, even vis-a-vis allies critical to Indo-Pacific power equilibrium, Trump has subordinated long-term strategy to short-term economic coercion, wielding trade pressure to extract concessions. Viewing allies chiefly as revenue sources may produce short-term returns, but it undermines trust and the foundations of joint strategy.

The self-inflicted damage was apparent when Trump’s trade war against India, in the form of 50% tariffs, killed any prospect of New Delhi hosting the Quad summit last year. India was originally slated to hold the Quad summit in 2024, but previous President Joe Biden persuaded it to host it in 2025 so that he could convene the leaders in his hometown of Wilmington in the twilight of his presidency.

Now India is making a renewed bid to host the Quad summit this year after the U.S. midterm elections, lest the grouping be relegated to geopolitical insignificance or even become defunct.

Washington agreed to the Quad foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi next Monday in an apparent attempt to reassure nervous partners that the arrangement still matters to it. Rubio is confirmed to attend, but the primary purpose of this meeting is essentially damage control — mainly trying to agree on a summit date to demonstrate that the Quad remains a functional pillar of Indo-Pacific security rather than a relic of previous U.S. administrations.

But symbolism cannot substitute for strategy. The reality is that the grouping increasingly lacks strategic clarity, institutional cohesion and political urgency.

The contradiction is glaring. If the U.S. itself is pursuing a more conciliatory approach toward Beijing, what exactly is the Quad’s central strategic purpose?

Originally conceived as a balancing coalition to preserve a favorable Indo-Pacific balance of power, the Quad cannot retain strategic credibility if its leading member simultaneously seeks geopolitical accommodation with the very power the grouping was implicitly designed to counterbalance.

The Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy reflects the grouping’s diminished status. The Quad receives only a single passing mention in the entire document — and even that only in relation to India. Such marginalization would have been unthinkable until 2024, when the Quad was routinely described by Washington as the cornerstone of Indo-Pacific strategy.

Meanwhile, the grouping has drifted toward low-risk initiatives — vaccines, critical technologies, supply chains and maritime-domain awareness — while avoiding the harder strategic questions that originally gave it geopolitical significance. Cooperation in these areas is useful, but such efforts cannot conceal the absence of collective political will.

India, Japan and Australia have reason for concern. Their long-term strategic calculations still rest on assumptions of sustained U.S. commitment to balancing China in the Indo-Pacific. Yet Washington’s signals are increasingly mixed: rhetorical support for the Quad paired with a broader search for accommodation with Beijing. With Trump’s China posture shifting, the Quad has become increasingly marginal to his strategy.

The result is strategic ambiguity and confusion that weaken deterrence and erode confidence among allies and partners alike.

The Quad was never meant to be a talk shop or bargaining chip in U.S.-China relations but a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and a stabilizer of the Indo-Pacific balance of power. Allowing it to wither through neglect risks vindicating Beijing’s longstanding contempt for the Quad.

The Quad is unlikely to disappear formally. Too much diplomatic capital has been invested in it for that. But alliances do not become irrelevant only when they collapse; they can also gradually decay into performative institutions that hold meetings, issue communiques and stage symbolic displays of unity while losing their original strategic rationale.

That is the danger now confronting the Quad. Unless its members restore strategic coherence and political purpose, the grouping risks becoming precisely what it was never meant to be: a Potemkin alliance — impressive in appearance but increasingly hollow underneath.

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.