India in the Quad and the Indo-Pacific (PSIR Optional)

India in the Quad and the Indo-Pacific

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue has no treaty, no secretariat, no budget and no mutual-defence obligation. It has collapsed once and stalled twice, and its most ambitious programme delivered a quarter of what it promised. Yet four governments keep reconvening it, China keeps denouncing it, and India — the member most committed to never joining an alliance — has become the reason it takes the shape it does. The question is what work a deliberately unfinished institution does for a state that has spent seventy-five years refusing to finish one.

The Indo-Pacific as a Strategic Idea

The Quad is unintelligible without the map it presumes. Before the grouping existed in its present form, the region it claims to serve had to be invented — or, more precisely, re-described. The replacement of “Asia-Pacific” by “Indo-Pacific” was a conceptual move, not a rebranding, and understanding what changed is the foundation for everything that follows.

What “Asia-Pacific” Meant, and Why It Was Displaced

• “Asia-Pacific” was a construct built around the Pacific rim and its economies, organised by APEC, founded 1989, and the American hub-and-spokes alliance system. The Indian Ocean was a separate theatre, handled by a different American command and a different literature, and India was peripheral to it and not even an APEC member — an exclusion that persisted through the decade in which India liberalised and turned east.
• The reconception rests on material facts before political ones. Four arguments carry it.
  • Flows are continuous. Energy and trade move without interruption from the Gulf through the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea to East Asia. Two separate theatres never corresponded to how goods and hydrocarbons travel.
  • China operates across both. The maritime Belt and Road, port development from Gwadar and Hambantota to Kyaukphyu and Djibouti, and a permanent PLA Navy presence west of Malacca since 2008 mean a power in two oceans cannot be met in one.
  • India’s position changes. A single system from the east coast of Africa to the western Pacific places India at the centre of a theatre rather than at the western edge of somebody else’s — why India adopted the term and why China resists it.
  • Sea lines of communication are indivisible. Chokepoints — Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Malacca, Sunda, Lombok — and the surveillance needed to watch them cannot be partitioned at the Andaman Sea.
• A fifth reason is architectural. The Indo-Pacific supplies a rationale for cooperation among states — India, Japan, Australia, France, Indonesia — that share concerns without sharing an alliance, letting a non-aligned state and three American treaty allies sit at one table without India becoming the fourth ally.

The map is the argument. Whoever draws the region decides who is central to it, who is peripheral, and what counts as interference.

The Intellectual Genealogy of the Term

• The term had two separate lives before its third.
  • Biogeography used “Indo-Pacific” from the nineteenth century for the marine realm of continuous species distribution across the two oceans.
  • Karl Haushofer, the German geopolitician, used Indopazifischer Raum across the 1920s and 1930s, resting it on oceanographic continuity and giving it an anti-colonial political content — the resurrection of Asia against European domination — drawing on the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar.
  • The lineage matters because it shows the Indo-Pacific is not an American invention of 2017, which is the Chinese claim.
• The contemporary geopolitical revival is Indian and Japanese, in that order, and both in 2007.
  • Gurpreet Khurana, an Indian naval officer and scholar, used the term in its modern strategic sense in “Security of Sea Lines: Prospects for India–Japan Cooperation” in Strategic Analysis, January 2007 — its first use in Indian strategic discourse.
  • Shinzo Abe’s address to the Indian Parliament on 22 August 2007, Confluence of the Two Seas, gave the idea its political voice, describing the two oceans as bringing about “a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity”. Japan’s authorship belongs to the India–Japan relationship; here it is the Quad’s intellectual point of origin.
• Official adoption took another decade.Hillary Clinton used “the Indo-Pacific basin” in Honolulu in October 2010; Australia’s Defence White Paper of 2013 was the first government document organised around the concept; and the United States adopted it formally from 2017, renaming Pacific Command as Indo-Pacific Command in May 2018 and publishing A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a Shared Vision in November 2019.
  • Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon (2010) did the popularising work in between.

Rival Definitions: Where the Region Begins and Ends

Every actor’s Indo-Pacific stops where its interests stop, and the differences are not cartographic pedantry. They determine whether Africa’s eastern seaboard, the Persian Gulf and the western Indian Ocean are inside the frame — which is to say, whether India’s primary theatre counts.

Actor	Geographic definition	What the definition reveals
India	From the shores of Africa to the shores of the Americas	The widest of all; it makes the western Indian Ocean and the Gulf central and India a resident power throughout
United States	Historically from the west coast of India eastward, matching INDOPACOM’s area of responsibility	Excluded the Arabian Sea and Gulf, long an Indian complaint; the seam with CENTCOM remains
Japan	Africa’s east coast to the Pacific, under FOIP	Closest to India’s; reflects Japan’s Gulf energy dependence
ASEAN	Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions with Southeast Asia at the centre	The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (June 2019) insists the region is a space for cooperation, not a strategy

Modi’s Shangri-La Formulation

India’s authoritative statement of its own vision came in the keynote address to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on 1 June 2018, and its features differ on almost every point from the American formulation.

• The region extends “from the shores of Africa to that of the Americas”, folding in the entire Indian Ocean and its African littoral.
• It is inclusive, meaning open to all states in the region including China, and ASEAN centrality is affirmed without qualification: ASEAN “has been and will be central to its future”.
• It rests on a common rules-based order, freedom of navigation and overflight, equal access to the commons as a right under international law, an open trade regime, and connectivity built on sovereignty and debt sustainability.
• And it is explicitly not a strategy and not a club.

“India does not see the Indo-Pacific Region as a strategy or as a club of limited members. Nor as a grouping that seeks to dominate. And by no means do we consider it as directed against any country.”

— Narendra Modi

• It also carried a line anchoring India’s refusal of containment framing — “Asia and the world will have a better future when India and China work together in trust and confidence” — read against the Doklam standoff of the previous year and the Wuhan informal summit of the previous month.
• The distance from the American formulation is durable. Washington’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific carries an explicit competitive purpose; India’s is an ordering principle. That gap is why India can hold Quad membership and a functioning border process with China at once.

India’s Own Indo-Pacific Architecture

India did not simply adopt somebody else’s regional concept. It built a set of instruments underneath it — a doctrine for the Indian Ocean, a functional cooperation framework for the wider region, a bureaucratic home, a maritime surveillance node and a network of access agreements. Most of these predate the Quad’s revival, and several would survive its collapse.

From SAGAR to MAHASAGAR

• SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region — was announced by Modi at Port Louis, Mauritius, in March 2015, and the acronym is also the Sanskrit word for ocean.
  • Its five elements: safeguarding India’s maritime interests; deepening security and economic cooperation with littoral states; collective action against disasters and maritime threats; sustainable regional development; and engagement with extra-regional powers on shared interests rather than exclusion.
  • It reframed India’s posture from guardian of a sphere of influence to provider of regional public goods — capacity building, hydrography, coastal radar chains, EEZ surveillance, disaster relief.
• MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — was announced, again in Mauritius, in March 2025, ten years to the month after SAGAR.
  • It is a widening, not a replacement of substance, and it moves India’s declared maritime doctrine from a regional security framework to a development-and-security offer addressed to the Global South — the constituency India competes for against Chinese lending.

	SAGAR (2015)	MAHASAGAR (2025)
Scope	The Indian Ocean Region and its littoral	Across regions — outward into the wider Global South
Emphasis	Security-weighted: maritime security, capacity building, disaster relief	Holistic: trade, technology, development finance and security together
Audience	Indian Ocean littoral states	The Global South, with India as a development partner
Relation	The predecessor and still the operational core	The current framing, absorbing rather than discarding SAGAR

The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative

• The IPOI was announced by Modi at the East Asia Summit in Bangkok in November 2019. It is deliberately open — any state may join, and states lead pillars rather than India leading all of them. Its seven pillars are the concrete answer to what India proposes for the region.

#	Pillar	Lead / co-lead
1	Maritime Security	United Kingdom and India
2	Maritime Ecology	Australia and Thailand
3	Maritime Resources	France and Indonesia
4	Capacity Building and Resource Sharing	Germany
5	Disaster Risk Reduction and Management	India and Bangladesh
6	Science, Technology and Academic Cooperation	Italy and Singapore
7	Trade Connectivity and Maritime Transport	Japan and the United States

• The pillar structure is the point. Most pillars are led by European or Southeast Asian states rather than Quad members, which keeps the IPOI legible to ASEAN and Europe as something other than a Quad annexe; Greece has since joined. The seven pillars also map onto the AOIP’s four areas of cooperation, so that ASEAN sees its own vocabulary reflected back.
• The honest assessment is that the IPOI has been an umbrella rather than an engine. It has no secretariat, no pooled funding and no published work programme, and the absence of an agenda under each pillar has limited it to conferences and bilateral projects such as the Australia–India IPOI Partnership grant rounds. The criticism made of the Quad applies here too.

The Institutional Machinery

• The Ministry of External Affairs created a dedicated Indo-Pacific Division in April 2019, pulling together IORA, ASEAN and Quad files previously scattered across territorial divisions — a small change with a large signal.
• The Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region was inaugurated at Gurugram on 22 December 2018, co-located with the Indian Navy’s Information Management and Analysis Centre.
  • It hosts International Liaison Officers from a dozen partner navies, from Australia, France, Japan and the United States to Bangladesh, the Maldives, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Singapore and Sri Lanka, and maintains information-exchange arrangements with more than twenty countries and over sixty working-level linkages with maritime security centres.
  • Its subject is white shipping — merchant traffic — and the threats hidden in it: piracy, illegal fishing, trafficking and dark shipping. It is the most useful thing India brings to the Quad’s maritime workstream, and in 2026 became the Indian Ocean node of that programme.
• The Andaman and Nicobar Command, India’s only tri-service theatre command, sits astride the western approaches to Malacca — the physical expression of the claim to be a resident power at the seam between the two oceans.

The Logistics Network

India has built, agreement by agreement, a reciprocal access network that gives its navy reach without giving it bases or allies. Each agreement permits refuelling, replenishment, port and airfield access and berthing on a reciprocal, case-by-case basis; none creates any obligation to act.

Partner	Agreement	Signed
United States	LEMOA — Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement	2016
France	Provision of Reciprocal Logistics Support	2018
Singapore	Implementation agreement on naval logistics	2018 (renewed 2022)
Australia	Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement	2020
Japan	ACSA — Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement	2020
Russia	RELOS — Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Agreement	2025, not yet operative pending Indian ratification

• Three of the four Quad members are in this list, and so is Russia — the network’s whole logic being access without alignment, assembled bilaterally so that no single partner can convert it into a claim on Indian behaviour.
  • They confer no basing rights, no permanent presence, no command relationship and no consultation obligation, and the contrast with a status-of-forces agreement is the contrast between an alliance and a partnership.

India’s Own Regional Instruments

• The Indian Ocean Rim Association, founded in 1997, has 23 members and about a dozen dialogue partners including China, the EU, Japan, Russia and the United States, and six priority areas from maritime safety and trade facilitation to fisheries, disaster risk reduction, science and tourism. India took the chair for 2025–2027, its second turn.
• The Colombo Security Conclave grew out of the India–Sri Lanka–Maldives trilateral maritime dialogue of 2011, was revived in 2020 and acquired a charter and a permanent secretariat in Colombo in August 2024. Members now number six, the Seychelles joining at the seventh NSA-level meeting in New Delhi in November 2025, and its five pillars cover maritime security, counter-terrorism, transnational crime, cybersecurity and disaster relief.
• Mission SAGAR, the naval humanitarian deployments of 2020–21 to the Maldives, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Madagascar and Comoros, demonstrated the first-responder role the Quad’s maritime agenda now partly borrows.
• The pattern is consistent: India’s Indian Ocean instruments are ones it leads, hosts or chairs; the Quad is the only Indo-Pacific format in which it is one of four equals. That asymmetry shapes what India will let the Quad become.

The Quad: An Institutional History

The Functional Origin, December 2004

• The Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 produced the Quad before anyone thought of it as a grouping. Within days, India, the United States, Japan and Australia formed a Tsunami Core Group to coordinate relief across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Thailand.
• India’s contribution was the significant one. A state that had historically received disaster assistance declined foreign aid for its own affected coasts and deployed some thirty-two ships to help its neighbours — the moment India began behaving as a net provider of security in its ocean rather than a consumer of it.
• The Core Group dissolved within weeks once the UN system took over: the four had shown they could act together and had no interest in institutionalising the fact. The 2021 leaders’ statement nonetheless recalled that the Quad’s efforts “arose out of an international tragedy, the tsunami of 2004″ — a genealogy framing it as a provider of public goods rather than a bloc.

Quad 1.0, 2007–2008

• The first formal quadrilateral meeting took place in Manila in May 2007, on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum and at official level, with Abe as its principal advocate. China issued démarches to all four governments — an unusual step that told them they had touched something.
• Exercise Malabar of September 2007 in the Bay of Bengal brought five navies together — the four plus Singapore — with three aircraft carriers and around twenty-five ships. It remains the largest Malabar held, and it fused in the regional mind an exercise and a diplomatic format that were never the same thing.
• Australia’s withdrawal is the conventional explanation for the collapse. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, standing beside Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in February 2008, said the quadrilateral was not something Australia would pursue.
• That explanation is incomplete. The Howard government had already said in July 2007 that it was not pursuing the format; the Bush administration had cooled on the idea from late 2006, prioritising Chinese cooperation on North Korea and Iran; and India under the UPA was itself hesitant, wary of provoking China while the civil nuclear negotiation was live and the Left parties supporting the government were hostile to anything resembling an American bloc. Shyam Saran’s recollection that the Americans wanted to go slow places the death in Washington as much as in Canberra.
• The inheritance was durable: an Australian reputation for unreliability that took a decade to shed, and an Indian conviction that a format with no institutional floor can be dismantled by one election in one capital.

The Revival, 2017–2019

• Quad 2.0 restarted at official level in Manila in November 2017, again on ASEAN Summit margins, in a transformed setting: island-building in the South China Sea, the arbitral award of July 2016 that Beijing rejected, the Doklam standoff of 2017, and Belt and Road financing across the Indian Ocean littoral.
• The four issued four separate readouts rather than a joint statement, the American text mentioning freedom of navigation in terms India’s did not. It was raised to foreign-minister level in New York in September 2019; a second ministerial in Tokyo in October 2020 still produced no joint text.
• The turning point in cohesion was the pandemic. From March 2020 the “Quad Plus” consultations brought in New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam, later Brazil and Israel — the Quad’s first functional agenda that was not maritime. Australia rejoined Malabar in November 2020 after thirteen years of Indian reluctance, a decision taken after Galwan and the clearest sign that Indian caution had shifted.

The Leaders’ Level, 2021–2024

• The first leaders’ summit was held virtually on 12 March 2021, producing “The Spirit of the Quad” — the grouping’s first joint leaders’ statement and the document that created its working-group architecture.
  • It committed the four to a “free and open rules-based order”, to UNCLOS, to ASEAN unity and centrality, and to a region “unconstrained by coercion”, and established three working groups — vaccines, critical and emerging technology, and climate.
• The in-person sequence followed: Washington, September 2021; Tokyo, May 2022; Hiroshima, May 2023 — relocated from Sydney after the American president withdrew over a domestic budget crisis, an early illustration of summit fragility — and Wilmington, September 2024.
• The chairmanship rotates, and India’s turn arrived in 2024. It was displaced when the outgoing American president chose to host at Wilmington, on the understanding that India would host in 2025.

The Interruption

• The India-hosted leaders’ summit did not take place in 2025, and no leaders’ summit had been held as of mid-2026. The reasons are cumulative rather than singular.
  • The American tariff escalation of 2025 — a reciprocal tariff on India peaking at 50% in August 2025 once a Russian-oil penalty was stacked on it — made a summit politically impossible for New Delhi.
  • Operation Sindoor in May 2025 and the subsequent American claims to have brokered the ceasefire, which India rejected, consumed the bilateral bandwidth a summit requires.
  • Scheduling: Australia’s national day falls on India’s Republic Day, and four domestic calendars proved hard to align. Beneath all of it lay a diminished American appetite for a format built by a previous administration around vaccines and climate.
• Following the New Delhi Foreign Ministers’ Meeting of 26 May 2026, India passed the chair to Australia, and the working assumption from that meeting is that the leaders’ meeting will in future convene on the margins of major multilateral gatherings rather than as a standalone annual summit.
  • This is the most consequential structural fact about the Quad today: a grouping whose only apex mechanism is an annual summit has discovered that its apex mechanism is optional.

What the Quad Actually Does

The Quad’s declared agenda is functional, not military. It has never conducted an operation, issued a threat assessment, designated an adversary or committed a soldier. What it has done is spawn workstreams — and the honest account of the grouping requires setting what each announced against what each delivered.

Maritime Domain Awareness

• The Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) was launched at the Tokyo summit in May 2022 and is the Quad’s most defensible achievement.
  • It uses commercial satellite-derived tracking data — radio-frequency and AIS feeds — to build a near-real-time maritime picture, pushed to regional states through four fusion centres: India’s IFC-IOR at Gurugram, Singapore’s, and the Pacific centres in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.
  • Its target is “dark shipping”: vessels that switch off transponders for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, smuggling or sanctions evasion. IUU fishing is the largest maritime problem for Pacific Island and Indian Ocean states, and the surveillance to address it is priced far beyond their means. The Quad supplies as a free good what they could not buy.
• The criticisms were made early and are real. Coverage left East Asia and the western Indian Ocean thin; the fusion centres were not linked to one another; partner states lacked the analysts and patrol assets to act on the data; interoperability lagged. Three years after launch, independent assessments called progress inadequate.
• The 2026 meeting answered precisely these criticisms — a rare instance of the Quad correcting a programme rather than announcing a new one.
  • India operationalised IPMDA’s Indian Ocean programme through the IFC-IOR; the four committed to a Common Operational Picture across the Indo-Pacific and launched the Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration for real-time vessel information.
  • The Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission, first run in July 2025 from Palau to Guam, is to be hosted next by India.

Critical Minerals

• The Quad Critical Minerals Initiative was launched by the foreign ministers in Washington in July 2025, and converted into the Quad Critical Minerals Framework at New Delhi in May 2026 with a headline commitment to mobilise up to US$20 billion in government and private capital.
• Its three strands are investment and project development; regulatory alignment, meaning faster permitting and a common approach to non-market practices; and recycling and recovery.
• The strategic reason is China’s near-monopoly and its willingness to use it. Beijing’s rare-earth export controls of April and October 2025 disrupted Indian automotive and electronics manufacturing directly, and Japan had met the same instrument in 2010 — the clearest case of the Quad answering a demonstrated vulnerability rather than a hypothesis.
• The obstacles are structural and unanswered. Chinese subsidies keep prices below the level at which alternative projects clear investment hurdles; pricing is opaque; China holds roughly 60% of rare-earth processing patents and controls the specialised equipment. The $20 billion is a mobilisation aspiration, not committed money.

The Other Workstreams

• The Quad Vaccine Partnership (2021) is the grouping’s most instructive failure and its most cited one.
  • The design was elegant: American finance, Indian manufacturing at Biological E in Hyderabad, Japanese and Australian financing and last-mile delivery, targeting 1.2 billion doses for the Indo-Pacific by the end of 2022.
  • It collapsed on contact with reality. The Johnson & Johnson component fell through over liability indemnities India would not sign and an American regulatory restriction; the substitute, Corbevax, lacked WHO emergency-use listing and therefore could not be donated internationally; and India’s catastrophic Delta wave from April 2021 forced a suspension of vaccine exports altogether.
  • Roughly 290 million doses were delivered against the 1.2 billion pledged — under a quarter. Reliance on a single manufacturing facility was a design flaw, not bad luck.
• The Critical and Emerging Technology working group (2021) has produced standards cooperation, an Open RAN deployment in Palau, a semiconductor supply-chain contingency network and principles on technology design — real but modest, and the substantive semiconductor work has migrated to bilateral channels.
• The Climate working group (2021) produced the Q-CHAMP package and a climate information services initiative, and has effectively disappeared from Quad statements since 2025, a casualty of changed American priorities.
• The Infrastructure Coordination Group (2021) was to align the four donors’ regional lending; its concrete outputs are the Ports of the Future Partnership (2024), undersea cables for Pacific Island Forum states and the Fiji port project of 2026.
• The Quad Fellowship (2021) funds graduate study in science and technology. Its first cohort was fifty students on about US$1 million, most places going to citizens of Quad countries rather than of the states the Quad claims to serve.
• The Quad Cancer Moonshot (2024) targets cervical cancer elimination through HPV vaccination and screening, its early commitments substantially philanthropic. Wilmington also produced MAITRI, a maritime training initiative layered on IPMDA; the Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network, a shared airlift pilot; and BioExplore.
• The Quad Initiative on Indo-Pacific Energy Security, launched at New Delhi in 2026 with a Quad Fuel Security Forum, commits the four to open energy markets and diversified supply. It has delivered nothing yet — a statement of fact rather than a criticism.

The New Delhi Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, 26 May 2026

• S. Jaishankar hosted Marco Rubio, Penny Wong and Toshimitsu Motegi in the first Quad ministerial held in India since the format’s revival.
• The statement’s language on the maritime commons was sharper than its predecessors.
  • It affirmed “navigational rights and freedoms, and the safety and uninterrupted flow of global commerce through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea”, condemned attacks on commercial shipping and opposed measures inconsistent with UNCLOS including the imposition of tolls — the first extension of Quad maritime concern into the western Indian Ocean and the Gulf approaches, India’s theatre and one that had sat outside the American definition of the region.
• It reaffirmed the rule of law, sovereignty and territorial integrity, opposed “destabilizing or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo, including by force or coercion”, and noted coercive actions, interference with offshore resource development and militarisation of disputed features in the South China Sea — without naming China, which remains invariable practice.
• It condemned terrorism, naming the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 and the Bondi Beach attack of December 2025. For India the naming of Pahalgam was among the meeting’s principal objectives.
• China’s response was formulaic. Spokesperson Mao Ning said cooperation “should be conducive to regional peace, stability and prosperity, and not target any third party”, while Chinese commentary called the Quad “a patchwork of interests” whose members “seek to leverage the bloc but are reluctant to bear excessive costs for it”.

The Delivery Ledger

The gap between announcement and outcome is the Quad’s defining problem, and stating it precisely is more useful than either celebrating the grouping or dismissing it.

Initiative	Announced	Delivered
Vaccine Partnership	1.2 billion doses by end-2022	About 290 million; the flagship product could not be donated
IPMDA	Near-real-time regional maritime picture, 2022	Real and valued, but slow; fusion centres unlinked until 2026
Quad Fellowship	Flagship people-to-people programme	Fifty students, about $1 million, mostly Quad nationals
Infrastructure Coordination Group	Coordinated regional infrastructure finance	Little coordinated lending; concrete outputs are cables and one Fijian port
Climate working group	Mitigation, adaptation and climate finance	Effectively dropped from the agenda after 2025
Critical Minerals Framework	Up to $20 billion mobilised	An aspiration; workstreams reporting into 2027
Leaders’ summits	Annual, rotating, in person	None held since September 2024; the format has been abandoned

• Total non-vaccine Quad funding has been assessed at under US$50 million — a figure that, set beside the grouping’s ambition and against Chinese regional lending, explains why Southeast Asian states have not organised expectations around it.

The Quad Is Not Malabar

Few confusions do more damage to an argument about the Quad than the assumption that it has a military arm. It does not, and the distinction should be held firmly.

• Malabar began in 1992 as an India–United States bilateral naval exercise and has run almost annually since. Japan became a permanent participant in 2015; Australia was admitted in 2020, thirteen years after the iteration from which India had excluded it.
• Malabar 2025, the twenty-ninth edition, was held at Guam from 10 to 18 November 2025 — the sixth with all four navies, with INS Sahyadri, HMAS Ballarat, JS Hyūga and USS Fitzgerald — and it went ahead through the worst year the India–US relationship had had in two decades.
• Malabar is conducted entirely outside the Quad’s institutional framework, with its own planning cycle and naval chain of command and no standing in Quad statements. The membership overlap is total; the institutional relationship is nil.
• The distinction is not pedantry. It lets India say accurately that the Quad has no military dimension while its navy exercises high-end anti-submarine warfare with three partners, and it means the Quad’s collapse would not end Malabar, and Malabar’s expansion would not militarise the Quad. The same separation makes the Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission a coast guard activity rather than a warfighting one.

Reading the Minilateral Landscape

Minilateralism has displaced universal formats as the working mode of Indo-Pacific diplomacy, and India participates in several groupings with overlapping and sometimes opposed memberships.

Grouping	Members	Since	Purpose	Treaty?	India’s position
Quad	India, US, Japan, Australia	2007; revived 2017	Functional cooperation across maritime, technology, health, minerals	No	Full member; resists militarisation
AUKUS	Australia, UK, US	2021	Nuclear-powered submarines and advanced military technology	Security partnership with binding programmes	Not a member, and structurally cannot be
I2U2	India, Israel, UAE, US	2022	Food security, water, energy, space, health	No	Member; largely dormant
The “Squad”	US, Japan, Australia, Philippines	2023–24	South China Sea maritime security and Philippine capacity	No	Not a member; the sub-theatre is not India’s
IPEF	14 states	2022	Trade, supply chains, clean economy, fair economy	Pillar agreements, not an FTA	In three pillars, out of trade
India–France–UAE / India–France–Australia	Three each	2022 / 2020	Western Indian Ocean maritime security, energy, defence industry	No	Founder of both
IMEC	India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, EU, France, Germany, Italy, US	2023	Rail-and-shipping corridor to Europe	MoU	Founder; stalled since October 2023
Colombo Security Conclave	Six Indian Ocean states	2011 / 2020	Regional security cooperation	Charter and secretariat	India leads it
BRICS / SCO	Includes China and Russia	2006 / 2001	Multipolarity, non-Western coordination	Yes	Simultaneous membership is the point

AUKUS, and Why India Is Not In It

• AUKUS was announced in September 2021 with two components. Pillar 1 delivers nuclear-powered conventionally armed submarines to Australia — Virginia-class boats from the early 2030s, then the jointly built SSN-AUKUS. Pillar 2 covers advanced capabilities: hypersonics, undersea autonomy, quantum, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare.
• India is not a member and could not be one, for structural rather than political reasons.
  • Pillar 1 turns on naval nuclear propulsion transfers between treaty allies; India has no alliance with any AUKUS member, would not accept the arrangements that come with one, builds its own nuclear-powered submarines in the Arihant class and has leased Russian attack boats.
  • AUKUS’s first effect on India was collateral damage to France, whose Australian submarine contract it destroyed and which is India’s closest European defence partner.
• Pillar 2 could in principle admit partners, and Japan, South Korea, Canada and New Zealand have been discussed. Progress has been slow: export-control and technology-release frictions, an American review completed in late 2025 that reaffirmed Pillar 1 while leaving Pillar 2 to be restructured, and doubt about whether it will field capability rather than research programmes.
• AUKUS and the Quad divide labour rather than compete. AUKUS is the hard-military track among treaty allies; the Quad is the functional track that includes India. That is what allows the Quad to remain non-military — and it is also evidence that when the three allies want a hard capability they build it without India.

IPEF and the Missing Economic Pillar

• IPEF was launched in Tokyo in May 2022 with fourteen participants, the American answer to having left the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017. Its four pillars are trade, supply chains, clean economy and fair economy, and it offers no market access and no tariff reduction — which is why it was never a trade agreement.
• India joined three pillars and declined the trade pillar, objecting to digital-trade, labour and environment provisions and to commitments on data flows and procurement that would have constrained domestic policy without reciprocal access. The Supply Chain Agreement entered into force in February 2024 and is IPEF’s one substantive product; the trade pillar was never concluded.
• The deeper point is that the Indo-Pacific has no economic architecture containing both India and the United States.
  • India is outside RCEP by its own decision of November 2019, outside CPTPP and outside IPEF’s trade pillar; the United States is outside RCEP and CPTPP.
  • The region’s largest integration project therefore has China at its centre and neither of them in it, which limits what the Quad can offer Southeast Asia more than any deficiency in its maritime work.

The Others

• I2U2, formed in 2022 around India, Israel, the UAE and the United States, is a West Asian minilateral covering food security, water, energy, space and health, its signature project a food corridor in Gujarat. It has been largely dormant since October 2023, illustrating how quickly a minilateral without institutional ballast can be suspended by a regional war.
• The “Squad” — the United States, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, at defence-minister level from 2023 and named in Hawaii in May 2024 — addresses South China Sea coercion against the Philippines. India is not a member because the western Indian Ocean, not the South China Sea, is its primary theatre; its interest in Manila runs through BrahMos exports rather than joint patrols.
• The trilaterals — India–France–UAE (2022) and India–France–Australia (2020) — cover the western and southern Indian Ocean where the Quad’s writ is thinnest, and show that India builds minilaterals as well as joins them.
• BRICS and the SCO sit on the other side of the ledger, with China and Russia inside them. Simultaneous membership is not an inconsistency to be explained away — it is the operative content of multi-alignment. India has never accepted that participation in one format constrains participation in another, and the refusal is the whole doctrine.

Does the Quad Need More Robust Architecture?

The proposition that a summit-driven mode is insufficient to the Quad’s challenges is not a hypothesis; it is a description of what has already happened. What is genuinely arguable is the remedy, and the arguments on each side are strong.

The Evidence That the Summit-Driven Mode Has Failed

• The apex mechanism stopped working. Four leaders’ summits were held between 2021 and 2024; none has been held since, the India-hosted summit lapsed, and the format has been redefined as a meeting on the margins of other gatherings.
• Delivery depended on summits and stopped when they did. Almost every Quad initiative was announced at a leaders’ meeting; without that forcing device, working groups lose the deadline that produced their outputs and the machinery reverts to consultation.
• Announcements have consistently outrun outcomes, which sympathetic analysts call a gift to the grouping’s critics: the vaccine shortfall, the fellowship’s scale, the infrastructure group’s thinness and the aspirational minerals figure form a pattern rather than a set of lapses. Initiative churn substitutes for follow-through, with new workstreams replacing dropped ones and no Quad statement has ever published a review of progress against prior commitments.
• Four electoral cycles are four points of failure. The grouping died once in 2008, when a change of government in one capital removed the last support for a format three of the four had already cooled on. Between 2024 and 2026 the American, Japanese and Australian governments all changed hands or changed leaders, and the Quad’s agenda visibly shifted with them.
• The absence of coordinated communication leaves an information vacuum that Chinese messaging fills, so regional states hear about the Quad chiefly through what Beijing says of it.

The Case for Institutionalisation

• A permanent secretariat or standing coordination cell would give the working groups continuity, institutional memory and a staff whose job is delivery rather than a portfolio added to four national bureaucracies.
• Multi-year funded programmes with published budgets would replace an announcement culture with an implementation culture, and would let Southeast Asian and Pacific states plan around Quad commitments as they plan around Chinese lending.
• A predictable calendar of ministerials and working-group meetings, decoupled from leaders’ availability, would insulate the agenda from the fragility that has just been demonstrated.
• A published review of progress against prior commitments in every joint statement — the single most-recommended reform — would impose the accountability the grouping currently lacks.
• Institutional form is resilience against electoral turnover. An arrangement that exists only as a habit of meeting can be ended by one leader declining to meet; one with a secretariat, staff and standing programmes cannot.
• Credibility in the region is a function of predictability, and ASEAN’s scepticism rests less on ideology than on the reasonable expectation that the Quad may not be there in five years.

The Case Against

• Informality is why India joined. A treaty-based Quad would require exactly the commitment India has refused since 1947, and the grouping would lose the member that gives it reach across the Indian Ocean and its claim to be something other than an alliance system.
• Formalisation would confirm the Chinese charge. A secretariat and a standing structure would make the “Asian NATO” description defensible, hardening the security dilemma the Quad claims not to be creating.
• It would drive ASEAN away. Southeast Asian states already suspect that Quad maritime activity masks an anti-China purpose; an institutionalised Quad would be read as a competing regional architecture and would strain the ASEAN centrality every Quad statement affirms.
• Loose coupling permits differentiated contribution. Because nothing is obligatory, each member gives what it can — Indian manufacturing and Indian Ocean reach, Japanese finance, Australian regional access, American technology — without any shortfall becoming a treaty breach.
• Institutionalisation is not effectiveness. The IPOI has seven pillars, named leads and five years, and has delivered less than IPMDA did in three; ASEAN has a secretariat and a charter and is frequently paralysed. Structure is not delivery.
• A treaty would raise the stakes of every crisis. An informal Quad can decline to respond to a Taiwan contingency without anyone calling it a breach; a formal one could not, and India would face precisely the entrapment risk it has always cited.

The Middle Position

Institutionalise the working level, not the leaders’ level: the Quad’s problem is not that it lacks a treaty but that it lacks a staff.

• The defensible synthesis is to make the machinery permanent while keeping the grouping non-treaty, non-military and non-obligatory:
  • A standing coordination cell or a designated “sherpa” in each capital, on the G20 model, with a small joint staff — an institutional floor without an alliance ceiling.
  • Regular working-group meetings on a published calendar, so that momentum does not depend on leaders’ diaries.
  • Pooled funding vehicles where money is the binding constraint — critical minerals and infrastructure — with public-private frameworks and stated targets.
  • A narrowed agenda. The sprawl across health, climate, space, cyber, education, biotechnology and minerals is beyond what four foreign ministries can deliver. Fewer workstreams, better resourced, where delivery is measurable: maritime domain awareness, supply-chain resilience and critical-technology standards.
  • A mandatory delivery review in every joint statement, which costs nothing and would change behaviour more than a secretariat.
  • Retaining the leaders’ meeting but relocating it to the margins of the G20, the East Asia Summit or the General Assembly — which is what has now happened, converting a fragility into a design choice.
• The measure of the Quad’s seriousness is not whether it acquires a headquarters. It is whether the next joint statement reports what happened to the last one.

The Criticisms

The Chinese Charge

• China’s position has moved from ridicule to alarm, and the sequence is the best available evidence of whether the grouping matters.
• Dismissal came first. At his annual press conference on 8 March 2018, Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the Indo-Pacific an attention-grabbing idea that would “dissipate like ocean foam”.
• Escalation followed the move to leaders’ level. By October 2020 Wang was describing the American Indo-Pacific strategy as underpinning “a so-called Indo-Pacific NATO”. In May 2022 he called it “bound to be a failed strategy” that “creates divisions, incites confrontation and undermines peace”, warning that “the outdated Cold War script must not be repeated in Asia”. The standing formulation is opposition to “exclusive cliques” and “small circles”.
• The Indian answer has been consistent, and is the government’s own account of what the Quad is not.

“This kind of using words like ‘Asian NATO’ etc is a mind-game which people are playing… That kind of NATO mentality has never been India’s.”

— S. Jaishankar

• The charge fails on its own terms. There is no mutual-defence clause, no integrated command, no standing force, no common threat assessment, no treaty and no secretariat; NATO has all six.
• But the Chinese objection is not a legal argument about Article 5. It claims the Quad’s purpose is containment whatever its form, and on that reading the absence of a treaty is beside the point. The response is not that the Quad is harmless but that India’s participation is bounded — no joint patrol in the South China Sea, no Quad security document, no Quad military agenda.

The ASEAN Problem

• Every Quad statement affirms ASEAN centrality, and ASEAN has never quite believed it. The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific of June 2019, driven principally by Indonesia, was in part a defensive document — an assertion that the Indo-Pacific is a space for inclusive cooperation rather than a strategy, issued precisely because the Quad’s revival threatened to organise the region around a framework in which ASEAN was an object.
• Southeast Asian positions are not uniform. Indonesia and Vietnam engage the concept confidently; Singapore and the Philippines are comfortable with maritime cooperation; Laos and Cambodia are the least receptive; Malaysia has been openly uneasy about minilateral security formats.
• The structural anxiety is that minilateralism hollows out ASEAN-centred institutions. If the consequential coordination happens in the Quad, the Squad, AUKUS and the trilaterals, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum become ceremonial and ASEAN’s principal asset — being the convenor everyone attends — erodes.
• The delivery record makes this worse. A grouping that promised 1.2 billion vaccine doses and delivered under 300 million, whose non-vaccine programmes total under $50 million, cannot ask Southeast Asia to organise expectations around it while China funds ports and trains thirty thousand Southeast Asian students a year.

The Talking-Shop Charge

• The strongest version is not that the Quad does nothing but that it does not do enough to matter to the states it claims to serve. On the metric of public goods actually delivered to Southeast Asia, the judgment that it has failed is defensible.
• The counter is that the metric is wrong. The Quad’s principal output may be habits of coordination among four bureaucracies that did not previously coordinate — an interoperable maritime picture, aligned technology standards and a standing venue in which a crisis could be handled — invisible until needed.
  • A second counter is deterrent rather than distributive: the Quad’s existence raises the political cost of coercion by making a coordinated response conceivable, a claim whose weakness is that it is unfalsifiable.

The Trade-Security Contradiction

• In 2025 the United States imposed tariffs on three of the four Quad members while asking them to deepen security cooperation; India’s peak reciprocal tariff reached 50% in August 2025.
  • The contradiction was resolved not by argument but by a deal — the interim trade understanding of February 2026 — after which the ministerial followed three months later.
  • That episode belongs in full to the subject of India–US relations.
• The structural lesson is that the Quad has no economic pillar of its own and therefore no insulation from bilateral economic conflict among its members. The security workstreams survived 2025; the political apex did not.

The Indian Domestic Critique

• From the strategic-autonomy tradition comes the objection that Quad membership erodes India’s independence, ties it to American Asian strategy and forecloses options with China and Russia. The government’s answer is that participation without commitment is what autonomy means in a multi-aligned foreign policy, demonstrated by simultaneous membership of BRICS, the SCO and the Quad.
• From the opposite direction comes the charge that India is the Quad’s “weak link” — that its refusal of a military dimension, its Russian defence dependence, its unwillingness to name China and its absence from South China Sea patrols hollow out the grouping’s deterrent value.
• Both cannot be right, and that both are made is itself informative. India occupies the position that dissatisfies the maximalists on either side, which is where a hedging power should expect to be.

The Theoretical Frame

The Quad is a hard case for international relations theory, and that is what makes it interesting. Structural realism predicts that a rising China should produce a counter-balancing coalition; what it does not predict is a coalition that refuses to become one. Naming the mechanism correctly is the difference between an answer that describes the Quad and one that explains it.

Balancing, and Why the Quad Is Not It

• Balancing in the neorealist sense has two forms. Internal balancing accumulates one’s own capability; external balancing forms alliances to aggregate capability against a threatening state. Kenneth Waltz treats its recurrence as the central regularity of anarchic systems.
• The Quad satisfies almost none of the criteria for external balancing: no aggregation of military capability, no commitment to act, no allocation of roles in a contingency, no joint planning against a named adversary, and no member that has changed its force posture because of the grouping.
• Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat refinement — that states balance not against power but against threat, combining aggregate power, proximity, offensive capability and perceived intent — explains the Quad’s existence better than Waltz does. All four changed their assessment of Chinese intent between 2007 and 2020, and the grouping revived when they did.
  • But threat perception is not symmetric, which explains the Quad’s limits.
    • For India the threat is a contested land border and a Chinese presence in its ocean; for Japan it is the Senkakus and the East China Sea; for Australia it is Pacific island influence and economic coercion; for the United States it is Taiwan and the global order.
    • Four different threats produce four different tolerances for confrontation.

Soft Balancing

• Soft balancing is the concept that fits the Quad best, and the term is precise rather than decorative. T. V. Paul and Robert Pape developed it to describe how states restrain a powerful state without confronting it militarily.
• Paul’s definition is the restraining of a state’s power or aggressive policies through international institutions, concerted diplomacy in limited and informal ententes, and economic instruments, applied deliberately over time to delegitimise threatening behaviour. Its mechanisms are institutional restraint, diplomacy and economic measures — not armies.
• On this reading the Quad is an “informal entente”: it raises the diplomatic and reputational cost of coercion, builds a normative case around UNCLOS and freedom of navigation, and signals that alternatives to a China-centred order exist, without a single military commitment.
• The concept has serious critics.Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue that soft balancing lacks conceptual clarity, empirical uniqueness and theoretical innovation; Keir Lieber and Gerard Alexander that most of what is so labelled is ordinary diplomatic friction, which occurs constantly and explains nothing.
  • The Quad tests the objection. If soft balancing is merely friction, it is hard to explain why four states built a persistent format, sustained it through three changes of government each, and equipped it with institutions and programmes. The counter has force too: if the Quad’s effect on Chinese behaviour cannot be identified, soft balancing names an activity without demonstrating a consequence.

Institutional Balancing

• Kai He’s institutional balancing offers the sharpest single lens. It is a realist strategy in which states counter threats by initiating, using and dominating multilateral institutions rather than by arming or allying.
• He distinguishes two forms. Inclusive institutional balancing binds the target state inside an institution and constrains it through rules and norms — ASEAN’s use of the ASEAN Regional Forum with China inside it. Exclusive institutional balancing builds an institution that excludes the target and coordinates against it — which is what the Quad does.
• The explanatory variable is economic interdependence. Where trade ties are deep, military balancing is prohibitively costly, so states substitute institutional instruments that address security concerns while preserving the economic relationship.
• This is exactly India’s situation. Trade with China reached about US$151 billion in FY2025-26 with a deficit near US$112 billion, and India depends on China for active pharmaceutical ingredients, electronics, solar equipment and rare earths. A state with that dependence cannot hard-balance; it can institutionally balance.
• India practises both of He’s forms at once — exclusive institutional balancing through the Quad, inclusive through BRICS and the SCO, where China sits inside the institution and its consensus rules. Calling this incoherent misses that it is the textbook combination.

Hedging and Issue-Specific Alignment

• Hedging is the deliberate pursuit of mutually counteracting policies to avoid choosing sides under uncertainty — engaging a rising power economically while building the means to resist it. It fits India’s China policy more comfortably than it fits Indian ideology, which prefers “strategic autonomy” or “multi-alignment” for the same conduct.
• Issue-specific alignment describes the practice more precisely: with the United States on maritime domain awareness and semiconductors, with Russia on defence spares and energy, with the EU on trade and climate, with China inside BRICS on financial-order reform, and with none of them across the board.
• The concepts are not competitors but descriptions at different resolutions. Soft balancing names the effect on China; institutional balancing the instrument; hedging the posture; issue-specific alignment the practice.

Alliance versus Partnership

• Rajesh Basrur’s argument is the most useful Indian statement of the case against alliance. Alliances belong to a Cold War structure of bloc confrontation and do not fit an age of deep economic interdependence. A strategic partnership preserves flexibility: it permits engagement with a partner’s adversary, avoids being dragged into a partner’s disputes, and can be deepened or thinned without renegotiating a treaty.
• C. Raja Mohan puts the opposite case in The Case for Alliance: India’s inhibition about alliances is a hangover from another era, partnership without commitment invites free-riding accusations, and India will not get first-tier technology while it remains a partner rather than an ally.
• Ashley Tellis presses it from the American side. Washington has extended benefits to India expecting a partner that will fight alongside it in an Asian contingency, and India has no intention of doing so; the United States is buying an alliance India will not sell. It is the sharpest critique of the Quad’s implicit bargain.
• Kate Sullivan de Estrada inverts the “weak link” charge: because the other three prioritise good relations with India, India’s reluctance lets it set the grouping’s pace and direction, and its resistance to being socialised into a Western order keeps the Quad’s development acceptable to all four.
• Tanvi Madan’s work on the China factor supplies the historical caution. Convergence over China drew India and the United States together once before, in the early 1960s, and dissipated when their assessments diverged. A partnership resting on a shared perception is only as durable as the perception.
• Rajesh Rajagopalan adds the structural warning that soft balancing is what states do when they cannot afford hard balancing: if the power gap with China widens further, India will face the choice it has spent two decades avoiding.

The Security Dilemma Reading

• The most serious theoretical objection is that the Quad manufactures the encirclement it was formed to answer. Measures one side takes as defensive are read by the other as offensive; the other arms; the first arms further. Chinese strategic writing does read the Quad this way, describing the Indo-Pacific as an encirclement strategy aimed at the Belt and Road, in the vocabulary of wei qi.
• The counter is that the sequence does not fit. The revival of 2017 followed the island-building, the rejected arbitral award and Doklam; Galwan preceded the leaders’ summit; the rare-earth controls preceded the minerals framework. The Quad has been reactive throughout, which does not disprove a security dilemma but does locate its first move.
• Joseph Nye’s warning applies to the wider setting: alongside a rising power’s challenge sits the Kindleberger trap, the risk of a power too weak to contribute to global public goods. A framework that treats every Chinese action as a threat and none as a contribution is as dangerous as complacency.

Medcalf and the Multipolar Region

• Rory Medcalf’s Contest for the Indo-Pacific is the fullest scholarly statement of the concept’s logic, and its central claim is that maps are instruments of power: the region one draws determines who is central, who is peripheral and what counts as interference.
• His argument against Chinese primacy is demographic and economic rather than military. He projects that by mid-century four middle powers — Japan, India, Indonesia and Australia — will together exceed China in both population and combined GDP, making the region too large and too plural for any single hegemony, and gives minilaterals genuine agency rather than the subordinate role the alliance system assigned middle powers.
• His prescription is a calibrated mix of development, deterrence and diplomacy, rejecting both containment and accommodation for conditional engagement — incorporating China as a legitimate power within a plural order.
• The Indian reading is favourable for an obvious reason: an Indo-Pacific that is multipolar by nature is one in which India is a pole, which is precisely India’s claim about itself.

What India Gets, and What It Gives Up

• What the Quad supplies that bilateral relationships would not.
  • A maritime picture India could not build alone, and the standing that comes from hosting its Indian Ocean node.
  • Access to critical-minerals and semiconductor arrangements on terms shaped partly by India rather than offered to it.
  • A regional voice without a treaty — a seat where Indo-Pacific order is discussed, which the Asia-Pacific framing denied India for thirty years, and a hedge that costs nothing in commitment.
  • Leverage inside each bilateral: India’s value to Washington, Tokyo and Canberra rises because the other two want it engaged.
• What it costs.
  • A measure of the ambiguity India traditionally preserved: however carefully New Delhi words its statements, membership is read in Beijing as alignment, with exposure to Chinese retaliation in trade, at the border and through Pakistan.
  • Expectations it will not meet, and the reputational charge of being the weak link.
  • Dependence on three other domestic politics: India’s Quad equity can be devalued by an election it does not vote in.
• The honest verdict on effect is mixed. The Quad has not raised the cost of Chinese action at the Line of Actual Control, where the 2020 crisis was managed bilaterally and de-escalation remains partial, and it has not deterred coercion in the South China Sea.
  • What it has done is give four states a coordinating habit, a shared maritime picture and an alternative offer, and give India a platform on which it is co-equal rather than supplicant.
• The defensible claim is the modest one. The Quad has not changed the regional balance; it has changed who gets to describe the region, and for a state that spent three decades outside the definition that is not a small return.

Conclusion

The Quad’s weaknesses and its usefulness have the same source. It has no treaty, so it cannot compel; no secretariat, so it cannot follow through; no military dimension, so it cannot deter. Those absences are also why India is in it, why ASEAN tolerates it, and why it survived a 50% tariff, a lapsed summit and three changes of government.

• The 2026 lapse showed not that the Quad is dying but that its architecture was never load-bearing. A format whose only apex was an annual summit discovered that summits are optional, and the response is to build the layer beneath rather than the layer above.
• India’s own Indo-Pacific instruments will outlast any Quad outcome. MAHASAGAR, the IPOI, the IFC-IOR, the logistics network, IORA and the Colombo Security Conclave exist independently; the Quad is one instrument within that architecture rather than its centre.
• The grouping’s real test is delivery to third parties, not cohesion among the four. On critical minerals, maritime domain awareness and supply-chain resilience it has three workstreams where success is measurable, and it has never been so exposed to being measured.
• For India the Quad’s value is that it is the only Indo-Pacific format in which India shapes the terms rather than accepting them, and the only one that costs nothing in commitment. Whether that is enough turns on a question it has not had to answer: what the Quad would do on the day something happens.