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.

What may seem like strategic pragmatism to Trump looks like strategic retrenchment in Tokyo and other Asian capitals

By Brahma Chellaney
Contributing Writer, The Japan Times

Soon after departing Beijing for the U.S. last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump called Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to brief her on his talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The call was intended to reassure Tokyo after Trump’s high-stakes summit in Beijing.

But Japan can scarcely draw comfort from the symbolism of that phone call.

For Tokyo, the critical issue is whether the U.S. is fundamentally rethinking its approach toward China — and whether that shift could leave Japan dangerously exposed at a time of rising Asian instability fueled at least in part by Chinese expansionism.

The Beijing summit underscored a striking reversal in America’s China policy. Trump, casting aside both the adversarial approach of his first term (which the Biden administration largely maintained) and the hawkish rhetoric of the early months of his second term, now appears to be pursuing a policy of pragmatic accommodation.

The seismic shift in China policy, from confrontation to an increasingly dovish posture, holds profound implications for Japanese and broader Asian security, as the reversal comes just when Chinese coercive power is expanding.

During his first presidency, Trump defined China as the most consequential U.S. adversary, launched tariffs and made the Indo-Pacific central to U.S. strategy. He revived “the Quad,” strengthened pressure on Beijing and increasingly treated economic dependence on China as a national-security vulnerability.

In contrast, the latest summit projected a conspicuously conciliatory U.S. stance. The same president who often treats U.S. allies and strategic partners like freeloaders, vassals or adversaries, adopted a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. He lavished praise on China and Xi, even telling the Chinese leader, “It’s an honor to be your friend.”

The U.S. shift is occurring when Japan, under Takaichi’s leadership, has accelerated military normalization, increased defense spending and linked Taiwan’s security to its own. Now Tokyo faces an uncomfortable paradox: Just as Japan is seeking stronger deterrence against China, its principal ally appears to be edging toward tactical accommodation with Beijing.

For Japanese strategists, this revives an old nightmare — an “over-the-head” arrangement in which Washington and Beijing stabilize their relationship while Japanese security concerns are treated as secondary.

The concern is not that Trump will abandon allies. Rather, it is the prospect of gradual erosion: delayed or scaled-back arms sales to Taiwan, quieter naval operations, greater ambiguity in American commitments and increasing willingness to defer to Chinese “red lines” in exchange for economic or diplomatic concessions.

In a transactional framework, such concessions can accumulate incrementally. Over time, they alter the regional balance.

Trump’s willingness to roll back sanctions on Chinese refiners purchasing Iranian oil, together with his studied ambiguity on Taiwan and arms sales to Taipei, will reinforce concerns in Tokyo that immediate transactional calculations are increasingly outweighing Indo-Pacific deterrence.

His silence on China’s egregious human-rights record further underpins the perception that strategic accommodation is increasingly taking precedence over principle and long-term security.

Behind Trump’s conciliatory turn toward China lie the mounting costs of his Iran war fiasco, economic turbulence at home and slumping approval ratings.

The war against Iran has exposed serious strains in American military capacity. Precision-guided munitions, missile interceptors and other high-end systems have been consumed at alarming rates, depleting stockpiles. The conflict has also revealed vulnerabilities in U.S. forward bases and maritime operations — lessons Beijing is undoubtedly studying closely.

At the same time, China has demonstrated powerful economic leverage. A year ago, in response to Trump’s sky-high tariffs, Beijing effectively pulled a geoeconomic kill switch by halting most exports of rare-earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech production. Washington was forced to climb down and negotiate a truce.

For Trump, confrontation with China now carries mounting economic and political costs. Inflationary pressures stemming from Middle East instability, fears of supply-chain disruption and concerns over U.S. debt have strengthened Washington’s incentives to stabilize ties with Beijing, lest China weaponize its holdings of U.S. Treasuries and America’s dependence on China-centered supply chains.

But what may seem like strategic pragmatism in Washington looks like strategic retrenchment in Tokyo and other Asian capitals that rely on the credibility of U.S. deterrence.

Japan’s security environment is uniquely vulnerable to any weakening of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan is not a distant geopolitical issue for Japan but central to its national security. If China were to dominate Taiwan, it would gain greater control over the maritime choke points and sea lanes through which much of Japan’s energy imports and trade flow.

Moreover, the Iran conflict itself has highlighted the geopolitical power of choke points. Just as disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have delivered a global energy shock, Beijing may conclude that pressure on Taiwan and surrounding sea lanes could coerce adversaries without requiring a full-scale invasion.

For Japanese policymakers, unquestioned reliance on an all-encompassing American security umbrella is starting to look risky. That realization is likely to accelerate two trends already under way.

First, Tokyo will intensify efforts to strengthen “minilateral” security networks across the Indo-Pacific, particularly with countries such as India, Australia, the Philippines and Vietnam. These partnerships increasingly serve as insurance against uncertainty in American policy.

Second, Japan’s internal debate over constitutional revision and long-range strike capabilities is likely to accelerate further. Trump’s Beijing pivot may strengthen the argument among Japanese strategists that Japan must become a more autonomous military power capable of defending itself even if Washington’s priorities shift.

The Trump-Xi summit may have reduced immediate tensions between the world’s two largest powers. But for nations on China’s periphery, the summit reinforced a more troubling reality — that Washington increasingly sees the world’s largest autocratic state less as a challenger to be contained and more as a peer superpower whose cooperation America now urgently needs.

For Japan, the deeper fear is no longer merely a rising China, but an America growing less willing to confront it.

Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.

The Iran war has exposed systemic vulnerabilities in the American way of war, offering China a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

When President Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, it will look like another great-power summit. It is anything but. The balance has shifted — and not in Washington’s favor.

Trump goes with a weakened hand as the Iran war has boomeranged into a global energy shock. The visit, delayed from March to May as the conflict escalated, is less a show of strength than it is damage control.

The geopolitical landscape has shifted markedly since Trump and Xi first agreed to the Beijing summit last October.

The immediate source of weakness is the war itself. What Washington billed as a short, decisive campaign against China’s closest Middle Eastern partner has instead exposed systemic vulnerabilities in the American way of war, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them.

Iranian reprisals degraded U.S. air defenses, blinded early-warning systems and left many of its 13 regional bases inoperable. Low-cost drones and missiles imposed disproportionate costs. Chokepoints became contested.

Just as consequential is the drain on U.S. munitions. Precision interceptors, missiles and other high-end systems have been consumed at a pace that has forced the Pentagon to divert stockpiles from Asia, thinning deterrence in the Indo-Pacific just as China’s coercive power expands.

Replenishment will take years, not months. And the problem is not just quantity — the war has exposed deeper weaknesses such as vulnerable forward bases, the difficulty of countering drone swarms and how quickly maritime superiority erodes in narrow seas.

These are not abstract lessons for Beijing. They are a playbook.

The Iran conflict has shown China how asymmetric tools can blunt a superior military, and how control of chokepoints can yield leverage without full-scale war. The implications are clear as Beijing plans for contingencies along the First Island Chain — from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines — which it views as a U.S.-led line of containment.

For Washington, the lesson is sobering: a two-theater posture may be far harder to maintain than had been assumed.

The U.S. economic picture is just as troubling. The war has triggered an energy shock that is feeding inflation and eroding political capital. Gasoline prices now shape the White House’s strategic calculus as much as battlefield outcomes.

Trump’s bargaining position is thus tied to his need for relief — relief Beijing is uniquely positioned to facilitate, whether through its leverage over Iran as its main oil customer or its central role in global supply chains.

In April 2025, in response to Trump’s tariffs, Beijing effectively pulled a geoeconomic kill switch by halting most exports of rare earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech production. Washington was forced to climb down and negotiate a truce.

This is the context in which Trump’s China policy has shifted — from confrontation to accommodation.

In his first term, Trump recast China as a strategic adversary, launched tariffs and made the Indo-Pacific central to U.S. strategy. He revived the Quad and treated economic interdependence as a vulnerability.

In his second term, that posture has softened. Planned tariffs have been paused, punitive measures shelved and rhetoric cooled. Even baseline steps — such as arms sales to Taiwan — have been delayed. As the administration now frames it, Trump seeks “stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations” with China.

The shift is unmistakable. The U.S. remains deeply reliant on Chinese inputs, not least rare earths, and Beijing has shown it will weaponize that dependence. At a moment of depleted munitions and economic strain, the risk of disruption is a constraint Trump cannot ignore.

Trump now needs China — a major financier of U.S. government spending — in ways he did not in his first term. Then, a strong economy allowed escalation. Now, stagflation makes confrontation costly. The White House needs stable supply chains, and cannot risk Beijing weaponizing its U.S. Treasury holdings as U.S. borrowing rises.

That dependence reframes the summit. Trump is going not to dictate terms but to seek relief — on energy and financial stability and a political “win.” Chinese cooperation will not come cheap.

Beijing’s leverage is substantial. It has cushioned its energy vulnerabilities through stockpiles and overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, while deepening ties with Moscow. China can afford patience, and will trade only for advantage.

Export controls are a prime target. Beijing will push to ease restrictions on advanced semiconductors and AI. Extending the trade truce will be framed as stabilizing but will lock in Chinese gains.

The most sensitive domain is security — above all, Taiwan. The concern is not a dramatic “sell-out,” but gradual erosion: fewer arms sales, quieter naval operations, more ambiguity. In a transactional framework, such concessions can be traded piecemeal. Over time, they shift the balance.

The Iran war has sharpened these concerns by exposing Taiwan’s vulnerabilities. Highly dependent on imported energy and with limited reserves, Taiwan is exposed to sea-lane disruption. The lesson of Hormuz — that chokepoint control can impose pressure without invasion — will not be lost on Beijing.

All this points to a stark conclusion: Trump’s visit comes on terms that favor China. The likely outcome is a managed detente — a cooling of rhetoric and a symbolic reset. Trump will present it as deal-making prowess; Xi as proof of China’s rise. Both will claim success.

But the underlying shift will endure. A rivalry of near-peers is giving way to something closer to a creditor-debtor dynamic, in which Washington seeks relief and Beijing sets terms. Beijing can wait. Washington cannot.

In geopolitics, as in markets, timing matters. Trump is going to Beijing at the wrong time, and with fewer cards than he would like. The question is not whether he can strike a deal, but what he will give up to get one.

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

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive.

As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically.

Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach is turning it into its own worst enemy. Nowhere is this clearer than in its relationship with Japan, which it has pushed from wary partner to strategic counterweight over the past two decades.

More recently, China’s full-spectrum pressure campaign against Japan — intended to weaken Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — has instead helped deliver her a landslide victory in the Feb. 8 election. Japanese voters appear to have grown weary of Beijing’s coercion. The resulting supermajority in the Diet gives Takaichi not only political authority, but also strategic latitude to harden Japan’s statecraft against China.

Japan’s election has thus delivered something Taiwan has not heard in a long time: genuinely good news.

For Taipei, Takaichi’s victory is not just another electoral outcome in a neighboring democracy. It marks a strategic inflection point for Taiwan’s security environment. For the first time in decades, Japan is moving decisively from strategic ambiguity toward strategic clarity — and that shift matters enormously for Taiwan’s future.

The first and most consequential change is political. Takaichi has been more explicit than any previous Japanese leader in stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan itself. Under Japan’s 2015 security legislation, that language is not rhetorical; it provides the legal basis for the Self-Defense Forces to exercise collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s survival.

In practical terms, this signals that Japan is politically and legally prepared to stand alongside the US if Taiwan is attacked.

For Taiwan, this reduces the most dangerous form of uncertainty — not whether China might act, but whether others would respond.

It may also explain Beijing’s sharp reaction. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) denounced Takaichi’s Taiwan position as a “challenge to China’s sovereignty.”

The second shift is military. Japan’s southwestern island chain, stretching from Kyushu to Yonaguni just 110 kilometers from Taiwan, is rapidly becoming a fortified defensive arc. Japanese missile batteries, air defense systems, electronic warfare units and surveillance networks are being deployed along this chain, transforming it from a symbolic “tripwire” into a credible counterstrike barrier. This significantly complicates any Chinese attempt to blockade Taiwan or project force across the Taiwan Strait.

Geography has always made Japan central to Taiwan’s security. Taiwan, in turn, underpins Japan’s own security as a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago. Under Takaichi, that geographic reality is finally being translated into operational strategy.

Third, Takaichi’s supermajority opens the door to constitutional reform. For decades, Article 9 has constrained Japan’s ability to act as a normal security provider.

With a two-thirds majority in the Lower House, Takaichi now has the leverage to formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and expand their operational latitude, even as she accelerates defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP.

A stronger Japan means a more secure Taiwan. Indeed, a Japan that is legally unshackled becomes a far more credible deterrent against Chinese expansionism — one that Beijing must factor into any calculus over Taiwan.

Japan now appears poised to move from reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing tangible costs. Nowhere is this clearer than along the southwestern island chain, where Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning, and ensure that no coercive maritime gambit or fait accompli seizure of territory goes unanswered.

Fourth, and just as important, Tokyo has demonstrated that it will not be intimidated by China’s economic coercion, despite the costs.

Beijing attempted to influence Japan’s election by restricting seafood imports and Chinese tourism, tightening export controls on critical materials, and intensifying military pressure around Japan’s southwestern islands. The effort backfired. Japanese voters interpreted the pressure as bullying and responded by strengthening Takaichi’s mandate.

That outcome carries a powerful message for Taiwan: China’s economic leverage is not irresistible, and democratic societies can push back when they choose to do so.

Taken together, these developments amount to something Taiwan has long needed but rarely enjoyed: strategic clarity from its most important neighbor.

The benefits for Taipei are concrete. A Taiwan contingency is now explicitly linked to Japan’s own security. Intelligence-sharing is likely to deepen as Tokyo centralizes its intelligence apparatus. Economic ties may expand through a potential Taiwan-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, embedding Taiwan more firmly in trusted supply chains. And Japan’s easing of defense-export restrictions opens the door to quiet but meaningful industrial cooperation.

None of this means Taiwan’s challenges are over. Beijing will continue to apply pressure — diplomatic, economic and military. Japan’s constitutional reforms will likely face hurdles in the Upper House and in a national referendum. Ultimately, Taiwan’s own resilience remains the decisive factor in its future.

But geopolitics is rarely about perfect security; it is about relative advantage. Compared with a year ago, Taiwan’s strategic position is stronger. It now has a Japan that is more willing, more capable and more politically authorized to contribute to its defense. And the US has approved a record US$11.1 billion arms package to strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence against Chinese coercion.

In a region where bad news has become routine, that alone marks a meaningful shift.

For Taiwan, Japan’s election result is a reminder that the balance of power in Asia is not static and that democratic solidarity, when backed by political will, can still reshape the strategic landscape.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).