“The Quad is here to stay,” U.S. President Joe Biden confidently proclaimed during the group’s final summit of his tenure in Wilmington, Delaware, on Sept. 21. To most observers, Biden’s claim may seem overly optimistic, especially because the Quad—a security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—has fallen apart once before, in 2008. But this time, for a number of reasons, the Quad is likely to endure well into the future.
For starters, the Quad has already weathered domestic power transitions—the key driver of its demise the first time around—in three of its participant states. The most important Quad participant, the United States, shifted from Republican to Democratic administrations (former President Donald Trump to Biden) with no corresponding downgrade in Quad participation. In fact, quite the opposite happened: After the Trump team revived the Quad in 2017, the Biden administration participated in not only the first in-person summit in 2021 but also five more summits, including two virtual ones. From the outset, the Biden team pledged to have the Quad play a “defining role in the region” in keeping China in check in the Indo-Pacific. Neither Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned on changing anything about the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy if he or she wins the election this November.
Similarly, Australia in 2022 experienced a switch from Liberal to Labour Party prime ministers (Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese), and Canberra has not dampened any of its Quad activities. Meanwhile, Japan has undergone three prime minister transitions (Shinzo Abe to Yoshihide Suga to Fumio Kishida to, now, Shigeru Ishiba), all from the Liberal Democratic Party, with no change in Tokyo’s appetite to engage in the grouping. India is the only country where a domestic leadership change has not yet occurred, but even there, the opposition Indian National Congress party has not contested Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s foreign policy, pledging before the last election in April to “uphold continuity.”
Quad participants are standing pat in large part because their security environment has significantly worsened since 2008. There is not just China’s rising assertiveness throughout the Indo-Pacific but also North Korea’s expanding nuclear program and increasingly confrontational behavior. Japan continues to face constant Chinese patrols around the disputed Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu) in the East China Sea, and it harbors growing concerns over a Taiwan Strait crisis impacting its southwestern Ryukyu Islands. Tokyo also worries about North Korean missile tests, some of which have overflown Japanese airspace in the past. Australia’s rising tensions with China, including over Beijing’s harsh treatment of Hong Kong, bilateral trade disputes, and alleged Chinese political interference, contributed to Canberra in 2020 conducting a major strategic review that concluded China was its main security threat. India’s geostrategic calculations toward China dramatically changed in 2020 after Beijing’s military encroachment into Indian-controlled territory along their disputed land border in the Himalayas.
In Wilmington, Biden summed up these concerns when he was caught on a hot microphone telling his counterparts: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region, and it’s true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South China, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.”
Japan has taken Chinese and North Korean threats as a prompt to expand and deepen its bilateral security alliance with the United States. Tokyo and Washington are now more entwined than ever before, especially in areas such as command and control and defense industrial production and maintenance. But Tokyo wants collective security mechanisms as another layer of protection. Notably, Ishiba, the new Japanese prime minister, has called for the establishment of an “Asian NATO.”
Australia, likewise, has been convinced by Beijing’s growing economic and military power to strengthen its security alliance with the United States. In 2021, Canberra went a step further: It signed the AUKUS security pact with the United Kingdom and United States, headlined by the co-production of nuclear-powered submarines, while pledging collaboration on many more military technologies and defense initiatives to counter China. The three AUKUS members are also considering how Japan might join or otherwise play a role on the non-nuclear side of their pact, known as Pillar II.
In the meantime, the United States, Australia, and Japan are forging ahead on other security initiatives, such as periodically conducting joint exercises to deter Chinese adventurism as it tries to assert its vast claims to the South China Sea. Canberra and Tokyo are further bolstering their own bilateral security ties. Last year, for example, they activated a reciprocal access treaty allowing each country’s forces to operate in the other country. India has also sought greater security collaboration with the United States, which now includes the sale of U.S.-made MQ-9B Reaper drones to New Delhi as well as joint production of fighter jet engines, an extremely sensitive military technology. India’s bilateral security partnerships with Australia and Japan are on the rise as well.
It is fair to say security relations between and among the four Quad participants are at an historic high point. This is a good sign because it suggests that the Quad is no longer a temporary, fair-weather construct like the first time around. Rather, the arrangement is a complementary and augmenting mechanism that supports the hard security lines these countries have already adopted toward China. And, importantly, Quad leaders avoid public mention of China as their top threat or rival, which works well for the one participant—India—that is queasy about doing so. Keeping India comfortable by allowing it to reasonably argue that the Quad’s activities are compatible with its nonaligned foreign policy will be key to the arrangement’s survival in the future.
Another reason the Quad is likely to endure is related to the remarkable expansion of mutual transnational challenges it addresses today compared with its earlier years. The original Quad—initially known as the Tsunami Core Group, with the same participating countries—was charged with delivering humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to Indonesia and 13 other countries devasted by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. But by 2006, the Quad had transformed significantly, and participants were already on the defensive to explain that their discussions were not designed to counter China. This is less of a concern today given the long list of aggressive Chinese actions in the region, even if India remains reluctant to take a public stance.
Today, even Beijing would find it hard to argue that the Quad is exclusively focused on rivalry. There are just too many other issues that the Quad is now focused on, few of which are directly related to China. For example, the Wilmington summit declaration includes a cancer cure moonshot, disaster relief, infrastructure, critical and emerging technologies, and clean energy. Even in maritime security, a more sensitive area where the Quad plans to conduct joint coast guard activities next year, the group was careful to avoid suggesting that its efforts are aimed at China, noting they are to “improve interoperability and advance maritime safety, and continuing with further missions in future years across the Indo-Pacific.”
The Quad also benefits from sheer bureaucratic momentum following six leadership summits, eight foreign minister meetings, and the establishment of intergovernmental cooperation across various departments, ministries, and agencies.
Of course, much could still go wrong. As global crises continue to heat up, disagreements could widen among the Quad’s members. With Russia escalating its war in Ukraine, India and the rest of the Quad continue to diverge as New Delhi seeks to maintain its long-standing strategic partnership with Moscow and remain neutral. Other crises could also crop up to stress the group. A good example is a future Chinese attack on Taiwan. India would strenuously seek to avoid involvement in such a conflict, and New Delhi has very likely been the lone holdout preventing any explicit mention of the need to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait in the Quad’s public statements. Indeed, there is no mention of Taiwan in the Wilmington declaration.
Another possibility is that the Quad eventually gets squeezed out by other minilaterals—small groups collaborating on a particular set of challenges. Besides the Quad and AUKUS, the United States has another minilateral arrangement with Australia and Japan in the South China Sea and has worked the Philippines into other permutations as well. Then there is the “Squad,” a new foursome with similar membership as the Quad—except that the Philippines has replaced India. This new minilateral has already met on at least one occasion. If China’s challenge—especially in and around the South China Sea—intensifies to the point where India’s reservations make the Quad ineffective, the Squad or another such group could take its place as the region’s security centerpiece.
The increasingly threatening security environment could also change. If Washington and Beijing dial back their great-power competition, if Pyongyang decides to engage in denuclearization talks, or if New Delhi seeks accommodation with Beijing, then it could take the wind out of the Quad’s sails. But neither China nor North Korea appears to be diminishing as threats. If anything, the opposite is true today, so the Quad appears here to stay for the foreseeable future.