The Quad at an Inflection Point: Ministerial Diplomacy as Life Support

Source: Quad Foreign Ministers Meeting in Manila, July 2026

by Brig Arun Sahgal (Rtd)

The Quadrilateral (Quad) Security Dialogue is in a state of institutional limbo — marked by two contrasts. At the working level, it has been quite active while being uncertain at the leaders’ level. There have been three Foreign Ministers’ Meetings: New Delhi and Manila in May and July 2026, following on from the Washington meeting in January 2025 (immediately after President Trump’s inauguration). This represents an unprecedented set of ministerial engagements. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has pointed to this frequency as proof that “three Foreign Ministers’ Quad meetings in a very short space of time demonstrates the commitment of all countries to it.” Yet the very insistence on demonstrating commitment highlights a lack of institutional obligation that needs to be affirmed from time to time. Reality is that institutions confident of their own momentum do not need to keep proving their existence. It will not be incorrect to say that the Quad, as it stands, is being kept functional by respective foreign offices while the principals stay away.

The summit that will not happen

The proximate cause of the current status is well known, nevertheless worth restating. India assumed the rotating Quad chairmanship in 2024 with an expectation (reinforced by Prime Minister Modi’s 2023 announcement ) that it would host the Leaders’ Summit that year. Washington’s insistence on hosting before President Biden demitted office pushed India’s turn to 2025. That year came and went without a summit. It appears to have become a casualty of Operation Sindoor, with President Trump presumably using the summit as leverage to demand and conclude a US-centric trade agreement as a precondition for travel. Under present circumstances, a ‘Summit’ during India’s chairmanship remains unlikely. If the foreign offices of partner countries are to be believed, the hitch is in the non-availability of mutually acceptable dates. The US is increasingly caught in the Iranian quagmire, forcing détente with China during President Trump’s May visit. Now with President Xi’s visit to the US on the cards, President Trump is in no mood to upset the Chinese.

Notwithstanding the above, the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi in May this year was an exercise in keeping Quad momentum going despite the challenges. It can be argued that the ministerial gathering in New Delhi acted as a substitute for a leaders-level meeting. However, this argument can be challenged mainly because the joint statement was silent on the timing of a potential summit, a departure from precedent given that the previous year’s statement had anticipated an India-hosted meeting in 2025 that so far has not materialised. Official press briefing offered little clarity, prompting speculation that the Quad might be reverting to a ministerial-only dialogue, effectively undoing its 2021 upgrade to leaders’ level.

Most tellingly, the chairmanship itself has quietly moved on. India is now expected to pass the Quad chair to Australia without hosting the summit meant to define its tenure. A perception is growing within the Asian Quad partners that the US is losing interest in the Indo–Pacific, given the growing military commitments in the Middle East and European theatres, leaving little heft to take on China or the Sino–Russian combine in the Indo-Pacific.

Reading the disinterest correctly

It would, however, be a mistake to treat this purely as an Indian or a scheduling problem. The deeper driver is the Trump White House’s evident recalibration of value. The administration’s posture combines rhetorical continuity — Rubio has attended every ministerial — together with executive absence. Analysts have interpreted this bluntly: since Trump’s return to the White House, he has “refused to participate” at the leaders’ level, “leaving the Quad leaderless and degrading its geostrategic value.” This trajectory is likely to continue unless President Trump commits to attending an Australia-hosted summit later in the year. The stakes of that non-decision are existential for the grouping: continued absence risks relegating the Quad to “geopolitical insignificance” and potentially precipitating its practical utility.

This is, however, compounded by a parallel and more consequential diplomatic track — Trump’s direct engagement with Beijing. The May ministerial took place with Trump fresh from talks with Xi Jinping, a sequencing that itself raised questions about Washington’s long-term regional commitment. Japanese officials at the ministerial were pressed on whether Washington’s China outreach — including a planned Trump-Xi meeting in Washington — was slowing Quad momentum, and offered only non-committal denials. For a grouping whose entire raison d’être is coordinated pushback against Chinese assertiveness, a US President who treats Beijing as a primary interlocutor and the Quad as an optional extra sends an unmistakable signal about relative priority.

The ministerial track: substance without summitry

What is, however, striking, and deserves greater analytical credence than it typically receives, is that the ministerial track has not been idle. The New Delhi meeting produced the first-ever Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration initiative, a new Critical Minerals Initiative Framework, and continuing investment in energy technology supply chains exceeding $25 million. Ministers also reaffirmed progress on the Indo-Pacific Logistics Network, building on a 2025 field training exercise conducted during Operation Christmas Drop, with a second exercise slated in Japan. The July Manila meeting, convened on the margins of the ASEAN process, added an outward-facing dimension with a joint statement on Quad-ASEAN cooperation. This is not the profile of a moribund institution; it is the profile of a working-level bureaucracy sustaining functional cooperation in the absence of political direction from the top.

According to Stimson Centre’s analysis, the pattern reflects an administration whose foreign-policy instinct favours “action over words,” visible in a State Department fact sheet emphasising concrete initiatives on critical minerals, maritime surveillance, and cable resilience rather than summit theatre. Japan, notably, has hedged by pursuing its Quad objectives through parallel bilateral channels — Tokyo’s foreign minister met Modi separately in May, and Takaichi met Albanese independently — suggesting Quad members are no longer betting exclusively on the quadrilateral format to carry the relationship’s weight.

So how do we judge the status of Quad? The following three judgments highlight the paradox. First, the Quad is not dying so much as devolving — from a leaders’-level strategic signalling platform back toward the ministerial-and-working-group architecture it occupied before 2021. That devolution has real costs: leaders’ summits generate political capital, media visibility, and deterrent signalling value that ministerial meetings, however substantive, cannot replicate. Second, the credibility deficit is asymmetric. Washington’s absence is the variable every other capital is managing around, not a shared failure of will — Australia, Japan, and India have each continued to invest political capital in convening, even as the American principal has not reciprocated at the same level. Third, and most consequential for India, the passing of the chair to Australia without India ever hosting removes New Delhi’s leverage over agenda-setting at precisely the moment the grouping’s strategic utility vis-à-vis China needs reinforcing, not dilution.

The working assumption for the near term should be that the Quad survives as a technical-cooperation and coordination mechanism — useful, but no longer the flagship instrument of Indo-Pacific balancing it was designed to be. Whether it can be revived to leaders’-level relevance depends less on India, Japan, or Australia than on a single, largely unpredictable variable: whether Washington decides the optics of standing alongside three democratic partners are worth more than the optics of a “big, fat hug” from Beijing.

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Brig Arun Sahgal, PhD (Retired), a retired Brigadier, is the Director, Forum for Strategic Initiatives. He previously served as founding Director of the Office of Net Assessment, Indian Integrated Defence Staff (IDS), Ministry of Defence, and the Centre for Strategic Studies and Simulation, United Service Institution of India. His other assignments include Senior Fellow at the Delhi Policy Group, a policy think tank focusing on international and national security, diplomacy and Track II Dialogues, and Senior Fellow at the Mohan Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. The views expressed here are personal.

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