QUAD requires more robust architecture than the summit driven mode to tide over the current challenges. Elaborate. (2026, 20 Marks)
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue of India, the United States, Japan and Australia has no treaty, secretariat, budget or defence obligation. Since its revival in 2017, the four leaders’ summits of 2021–24 have been its main engine. The India-hosted summit due in 2025 never took place, and none had been held by October 2026. The premise of the question is therefore no longer a hypothesis: the Quad has already seen what happens when its summits stop.
Why the summit-driven mode is fragile
- The apex tier proved optional. The eleventh Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (New Delhi, 26 May 2026) could only “look forward” to a leaders’ summit, and the Sherpas who met in New Delhi on 3 September 2026 were preparing the next ministerial, not a summit.
- Delivery has depended on summits. Almost every initiative was announced at a leaders’ meeting; without that deadline, working groups drift. Announcements have outrun results, as the vaccine partnership’s shortfall showed.
- Four electoral cycles create four points of failure. Quad 1.0 died in 2008 when Kevin Rudd’s Australia withdrew, and climate has dropped out of the 2026 agenda, now built on four pillars.
- No insulation from bilateral quarrels. The US tariff on India reached 50 per cent in August 2025, and India rejected US claims to have brokered the ceasefire after Operation Sindoor. Working-level cooperation continued; the summit tier did not.
The challenges the Quad must withstand
- Coercion in the South and East China Seas, and Beijing’s rare-earth export controls of April and October 2025.
- Threats to shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz after the 2026 Iran war, now named in Quad texts.
- ASEAN’s doubts about the Quad’s staying power, and uneven US interest in a format built by a previous administration.
What a more robust architecture would involve
Robert O. Keohane‘s institutionalism (After Hegemony, 1984) explains why structure matters: institutions lower transaction costs and keep cooperation going when governments’ interest falters. In practical terms:
- A standing coordination cell behind the existing Sherpa channel, on the G20 model: an institutional floor without an alliance ceiling.
- A published calendar of ministerial and working-group meetings independent of leaders’ schedules.
- Pooled, multi-year funding where money is the constraint. The Quad Critical Minerals Framework (May 2026) aims to mobilise up to $20 billion of public and private capital.
- Fewer, measurable workstreams: maritime domain awareness, where India’s IFC-IOR in Gurugram now runs the IPMDA’s Indian Ocean programme and a new Maritime Surveillance Collaboration shares real-time vessel data; the Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission, which India launched from Chennai in September 2026; supply chains; and technology standards.
- A delivery review in every joint statement.
Why robust should not mean formal
- India’s strategic autonomy rules out a treaty, which would raise the risk of entrapment, for instance in a Taiwan crisis.
- Formalisation would lend weight to Beijing’s “Asian NATO” charge and deepen the security dilemma.
- It could alienate ASEAN, whose centrality every Quad statement affirms.
- Structure does not guarantee delivery: ASEAN has a charter and still stalls.
Kai He‘s institutional balancing (2008) and T. V. Paul‘s soft balancing capture the Quad’s real function: restraining China through coordination rather than an armed alliance. That needs continuity more than formal rules. S. Jaishankar describes India’s method as “convergences and issue-based arrangements” (2019), which explains how India sits in the Quad alongside BRICS and the SCO.
Conclusion
The premise is sound, but the remedy is to institutionalise the working level, not the leaders’ level. Permanent staff, pooled funds and published delivery reviews can make the Quad resilient while it stays non-treaty and non-military. Its seriousness will be measured less by a headquarters than by whether each joint statement reports what became of the last one.