Is It Going To Be A Rebirth Of The Quad?

Eurasia Review | Dr. Rajaram Panda

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Quad will convene a leaders' summit alongside ASEAN meetings in Manila from 16 to 18 November 2026. This initiative seeks to revive top-level engagement after India's planned 2025 summit was repeatedly delayed by bilateral friction over United States tariffs, oil sanctions, and visa restrictions.

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 ined the operational continuity of the grouping through four ministerial meetings, most recently issuing a joint statement in Manila in July 2026 targeting South China Sea maritime security without explicitly naming China. Quad diplomats sustain working-level collaboration. However, strategic alignment is strained by President Donald Trump's skepticism toward multilateral forums and his proposed nuclear trilateral meeting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin during the 18–19 November APEC summit. Consequently, Japan, Australia, and India are rapidly expanding bilateral defense and security cooperation to hedge against potential shifts in American regional commitments.

Comment

The structural weakness of informal groupings like the Quad stems from their dependence on executive leadership rather than treaty-bound statutory obligations. Unlike formal collective defence arrangements anchored in treaties like ANZUS, informal coalitions rely heavily on regular summitry to maintain momentum. When leader-level engagement stalls, operational integration degrades into fragmented bilateral initiatives. The reliance on ministerial-level dialogues maintains baseline diplomatic contact, but fails to compensate for the absence of head-of-state policy direction.

This operational gap manifests directly in joint defence planning and intelligence-sharing frameworks. Without a clear presidential mandate, working groups coordinating maritime domain awareness struggle to institutionalise real-time data integration across separate military command structures. Consequently, partners default to bilateral mechanisms, such as the Tokyo-Canberra Reciprocal Access Agreement, to secure operational guarantees independent of Washington's executive scheduling.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If minilateral security arrangements like the Quad remain vulnerable to leadership shifts in Washington, does bilateral binding through frameworks like the Tokyo-Canberra Reciprocal Access Agreement offer a more resilient deterrent against regional coercion?

The pattern suggests that bilateral treaties provide superior operational predictability, as legally binding access agreements establish permanent legal and logistical infrastructure regardless of political cycles. However, bilateral networks lack the broader diplomatic weight and combined maritime scale that four-power summits generate across the Indo-Pacific theatre. My assessment is that middle powers will increasingly rely on bilateral pacts for operational execution while retaining informal coalitions primarily for high-level diplomatic alignment.

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