The Quad Is Still Working. But Can It Survive Political Uncertainty?
The Quad was never a traditional military alliance. It has no treaty, permanent secretariat or automatic obligation to defend one another. Instead, its strength comes from the ability of four countries — India, the United States, Japan and Australia — to work together on shared strategic interests.
This makes the Quad’s recent uncertainty more important than a delayed summit. Without permanent institutions to keep it running, the grouping depends heavily on political support from its leaders.
The key question is simple: what happens to cooperation when political support becomes uncertain?
For India, this question has become more important for three reasons: uncertainty in U.S. regional policy, renewed American engagement with Pakistan, and the growing importance of technology, maritime infrastructure and reliable supply chains.
India may not need to replace the Quad. Instead, it needs to make cooperation within the grouping more practical and less dependent on high-level political meetings.
When political support becomes uncertain
The Quad gained considerable momentum after its revival. Between 2021 and 2024, its leaders held six summits. In January and July 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also met his counterparts from the other three countries.
However, 2025 exposed a weakness in the arrangement: India’s expected turn to host the leaders’ summit was delayed.
Summits matter because they allow leaders to set priorities, announce new initiatives and show that the grouping remains important. Meetings between officials cannot fully replace this political role.
But a delayed summit does not necessarily mean that the Quad has stopped working.
Some of its initiatives continued. The Quad-at-Sea: Ship Observer Mission began operating in June 2025 to strengthen cooperation between the four countries’ coast guards. The Ports of the Future Partnership held its first meeting in Mumbai in October 2025.
The Malabar naval exercise also continued to involve all four countries in maritime cooperation and military coordination, although it is not formally a Quad initiative.
These developments reveal an important distinction.
Political cooperation can slow down without bringing practical cooperation to a halt.
The Quad does not have permanent institutions that can keep every initiative running automatically. However, its existing programmes can provide continuity when political support weakens.
The real test, therefore, is not simply whether the Quad survives. It is whether the four countries can continue delivering practical results when their leaders are less politically engaged.
The Pakistan factor complicates India’s calculations
India can no longer understand U.S. regional policy only through the question of China.
Renewed American engagement with Pakistan has become another factor. Relations between Washington and Islamabad intensified after the India–Pakistan conflict in 2025. Pakistan also gained a role in U.S.-related diplomacy concerning Iran.
This has caused concern in India.
For years, Washington increasingly treated India as an important strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific, while moving away from the old approach of viewing India and Pakistan as two sides of the same regional problem.
The renewed engagement with Pakistan raises questions about how far that separation will continue.
However, it would be incorrect to conclude that closer U.S.–Pakistan relations automatically weaken the Quad. The available evidence does not establish such a direct connection.
A more reasonable conclusion is that India can no longer assume that China will determine every American priority in the region.
Pakistan may matter to Washington for reasons unrelated to India’s concerns about China. Iran, Afghanistan, Gulf security and regional diplomacy can all create separate reasons for the United States to engage with Islamabad.
Indian policymakers must therefore examine the specific interests that bring the Quad’s members together rather than assume that their shared concerns about China will automatically align their policies on every other issue.
A country can remain an important strategic partner even when its priorities differ across regions.
The Quad’s strength lies in what it does between summits
Despite uncertainty at the leaders’ level, the Quad’s agenda has become increasingly practical.
Its areas of cooperation include maritime security, reliable port infrastructure, critical minerals, emerging technologies and disaster response.
On 26 May 2026, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs recorded a Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting alongside the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative Framework.
These developments show that ministerial engagement and formal initiatives have continued despite the uncertainty surrounding the 2025 leaders’ summit.
The critical minerals framework is intended to support projects involving critical minerals in Quad partner countries and companies headquartered in those countries. It also aims to address gaps in supply chains and encourage greater alignment of domestic regulations.
However, announcing a framework does not establish that these goals have already been achieved. Its real value will depend on the projects and results that follow.
The same principle applies to maritime cooperation.
The Quad’s initiatives on maritime awareness and reliable ports can help countries in the Indian Ocean improve their capabilities without requiring them to join a formal military alliance.
This allows cooperation to focus on what countries actually need — better information, stronger infrastructure and improved security — rather than asking them to choose sides in a wider geopolitical competition.
This is the idea behind functional minilateralism.
A traditional alliance is built around broader strategic alignment and security commitments. Functional cooperation starts with a specific problem that several countries have a shared interest in solving.
Countries can therefore work together on practical issues even when their wider political preferences do not fully match.
Technology is changing the meaning of minilateral cooperation
This approach extends beyond traditional maritime security.
India and the United States have been developing cooperation on reliable technology supply chains through the TRUST framework. Subsea cables have also become an important strategic concern.
These cables carry more than 95% of international data traffic. They connect digital networks, data centres and other critical infrastructure across countries.
Their security matters because disruptions can affect international communications and digital services. Concerns about China’s expanding subsea infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific have added to the importance of building secure and reliable alternatives.
India’s own infrastructure shows why this issue deserves attention.
The country hosts around 17 subsea cables, with additional cables under construction. However, 15 of these 17 international cables converge on a six-kilometre stretch in Mumbai.
This concentration creates a potential vulnerability.
If too many connections depend on one location, a disruption there could affect a large part of the country’s international connectivity. More landing stations in different locations would provide alternative routes and make the network more resilient.
These examples show why practical cooperation does not always require a formal alliance.
India and its partners can diversify subsea cable routes without signing a military treaty. They can build trusted technology partnerships without making mutual-defence commitments. They can strengthen critical-mineral supply chains without forming a military bloc.
Yet each of these initiatives can improve a country’s strategic resilience.
The value of minilateral cooperation lies in its ability to organise countries around specific needs. Instead of waiting for complete political agreement on every issue, governments can move forward wherever their interests clearly overlap.
India needs more than the Quad
None of this makes the Quad irrelevant.
India still has strong reasons to work with the United States, Japan and Australia on maritime security, technology, supply chains and the wider Indo-Pacific.
The Quad’s ongoing initiatives also show that practical cooperation can continue even when political momentum fluctuates.
The limitation lies in its institutional structure.
A grouping without permanent institutions remains vulnerable to changes in political leadership. When a leaders’ summit is delayed, strategic coordination can lose momentum because no standing institution can independently replace the political direction provided by those meetings.
India therefore has an incentive to maintain other channels of cooperation, including the Australia–India–Japan trilateral and other maritime arrangements.
This does not mean moving away from the Quad.
It means recognising that the Quad is one instrument for advancing India’s interests, not the only framework through which India can cooperate with other countries.
The important question is whether practical cooperation can continue in areas of shared interest even when the broader political relationship becomes less predictable.
From political signalling to practical results
The Quad’s renewed prominence initially had a strong political dimension.
Its existence signalled a shared view of the balance of power in Asia. Leaders’ meetings demonstrated that the four countries were willing to work together. The political message was almost as important as the individual programmes.
The next phase can place greater emphasis on practical results.
Consider what each area of cooperation requires:
- Critical minerals: coordination between suppliers, companies and governments to build more reliable supply chains.
- Subsea cables: secure infrastructure, alternative routes and protection against disruptions.
- Maritime awareness: sharing information to improve understanding of activity at sea.
- Ports: investment, common standards and better infrastructure.
- Technology: trusted networks and more dependable supply chains.
- Disaster response: equipment and resources that can be deployed quickly when emergencies occur.
These problems do not disappear when political relations become complicated.
In some cases, their practical nature may even make cooperation easier to sustain. Countries do not need to agree on every geopolitical question to recognise the value of secure cables, reliable ports or better disaster-response capabilities.
The current uncertainty surrounding the Quad should therefore not automatically be interpreted as the collapse of minilateral cooperation.
Political momentum can weaken while individual programmes continue. If that happens, the Quad may become less dependent on its symbolic importance and more focused on the practical work its members can accomplish together.
The deeper shift in international cooperation
For decades, international cooperation was often understood through two main models: large international institutions and formal alliances.
Large institutions provided legitimacy and helped establish international rules. Alliances offered security commitments between countries.
Neither model works perfectly when national interests diverge.
The United Nations remains important for international legitimacy and setting common standards. However, large institutions can struggle to act decisively when major powers disagree.
Smaller groups of countries can sometimes move faster because fewer governments need to reconcile their competing interests.
This does not make large institutions irrelevant. It means that international cooperation increasingly takes place through several arrangements at the same time.
The United Nations can provide legitimacy. The Quad can support strategic coordination. Smaller trilateral groups can address specific regional problems. Technology partnerships can strengthen supply chains, while infrastructure partnerships can improve physical resilience.
A country can participate in all these arrangements without treating any one of them as a substitute for the others.
For India, this layered approach offers greater flexibility.
But flexibility alone is not enough. India needs the economic, technological, diplomatic and military capabilities to make these partnerships useful.
It cannot diversify its strategic relationships effectively unless it has the capacity to contribute to joint projects, develop its own capabilities and sustain cooperation over time.
The Quad’s future may ultimately depend less on the number of summits its leaders hold and more on whether its initiatives create capabilities that remain valuable when political circumstances change.
The grouping began as a political idea centred on strategic alignment. It has increasingly developed into a collection of practical arrangements involving maritime security, infrastructure, technology and supply chains.
This is not necessarily a retreat from strategy. It may be strategy becoming more practical.
In an uncertain Indo-Pacific, the real test of the Quad is not only whether its leaders can agree on a common vision. It is whether the four countries can keep solving specific problems even when political momentum weakens.