After failing to hold its leaders’ summit last year in India, the Quad—comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—will now meet at the foreign minister level during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the country from May 23 to 26. Meanwhile, the leaders’ summit scheduled for later this year in Australia remains uncertain. There’s a perceptible sense that the Quad is fading away.

Originally founded in 2007 to counter China, the Quad became moribund after Australia developed cold feet. When he was first sworn in as president in 2017, Donald Trump moved quickly to revive the grouping.

Nearly a decade on, why is the Quad stumbling? The recent deterioration in the U.S.-India relationship is clearly the proximate cause. That deterioration, in turn, is partly due to the Trump administration’s extreme policy volatility. But more fundamentally, the Quad’s current woes are rooted in the grouping’s structural flaws and limitations. Quite simply, the Quad’s failure was baked into its design.

Founded with the aim of countering a fast-rising China, the Quad always remained reticent about this goal. Its joint statements have never mentioned China by name, though criticisms of Beijing’s policies such as maritime coercion are always implicitly among its assertions. The stickler has been India. As the only non-U.S. ally in the grouping, India is understandably hesitant on needlessly provoking its giant neighbor, with which it had two serious military encounters in 2017 and 2020.

But much more significant than the coyness about China is the Quad’s confusion about its core identity. Is the Quad a security or a public goods club? If it is both, can it do both and meet its objectives? The U.S. readout of the November 2017 kickoff meeting was mainly security-focused. But soon afterward, the Quad began embracing a major public goods agenda.

However, after nearly a decade of activity, few significant public goods deliverables bear a “Made in Quad” signature. Illustrating this gap between promise and performance is the example of the health sector. During the pandemic, the Quad committed to donating at least 1.2 billion doses of vaccines globally by the end of 2022, leveraging India’s massive production capacity alongside financing and logistical support from the other three member states. However, it managed to deliver only 800 million doses, with the first batch arriving more than a year after the initial announcement. Similarly, in September 2024 the Quad launched a cancer moonshot initiative with HPV vaccine delivery targeting cervical cancer. But there, again, expectations have fallen short. There is no clear sense of when the first vaccine deliveries can be expected, with the goal not mentioned in July 2025’s joint statement.

The very idea of the Quad was inspired by joint efforts for relief and rehabilitation during the 2004 Asian tsunami. Disaster relief and its institutionalization should have been among its biggest successes. Yet despite conducting tabletop exercises and taking meaningful action during the landslide in Papua New Guinea in 2024 and the Myanmar earthquake in 2025, the Quad has not yet created a major and integrated capabilities node like, say, the AHA Center for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

It isn’t as though the Quad lacks worthy projects. Agriculture, climate change, education, infrastructure, space, telecommunications, and many other items are on the agenda. If anything, this spreads its rather limited net far too wide. The Quad’s informal structure is an advantage that ought to have enabled efficiently zeroing in on a few core issue areas that really matter. Contrast the Quad’s on-the-ground impact with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which, notwithstanding its recent evolution, has built many more tangible things on the ground—despite being older by just four years.

Ironically, the one arena where the Quad has shown appreciable progress is precisely what its member states skirt talking about: hard security. Through the Malabar naval exercises (which are the military face of the Quad in all but name) the four nations have deepened military interoperability and conducted sophisticated war-fighting drills, including anti-submarine warfare. Malabar began as a bilateral U.S.-India exercise, with Japan later added permanently. It was Australia’s 2020 inclusion that made Malabar’s membership congruent with the Quad.

For India, though, Taiwan or the South China Sea—by far the most likely U.S.-China conflict sites—are out-of-area theaters. New Delhi already contends with an intrusive China on its long continental border and is threatened by Beijing’s military nexus with Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani army. For this reason, the practical utility of the Quad’s military exercises in real-world combat scenarios is doubtful—and they also run the risk of being misread by China.

Security cooperation at the sub-military level, such as in maritime domain awareness and coast guard interoperability, is another component in the Quad’s official agenda. Such activities are more proportionate and productive. They build important counter-gray-zone capacities among the four states and help in combating illegal fishing and natural disasters.

Cooperation on such matters has not exactly been embraced by the region, however. Whereas the Quad’s suboptimal public goods performance has left Southeast Asia less than impressed, its security activities make China-hedging states in the region wary. The Quad has tried hard to woo Southeast Asia in the past with frequent references to ASEAN centrality. By contrast, ASEAN’s statements don’t typically mention the Quad, containing only vague references to “external partners.” The Quad tried hard, but it has ultimately failed to win over Southeast Asia.

How might China view the Quad’s increasing marginalization? At one level, this development doesn’t affect Beijing much, as the Quad was never more than a minor irritant. But at another level, China will take it as further evidence that a broad-based Asian security coalition led by the United States is unlikely to ever gain traction. This leaves Washington’s military-focused first island chain strategy as China’s primary concern.

Indeed, the first island chain is where America’s strategic priorities now lie in the Indo-Pacific. Since 2023, U.S. ally the Philippines has emerged as a central security partner for Washington, with an expansion of basing and joint exercises. A newer coalition dubbed the Squad, with the Philippines replacing India in a similar four-state grouping, is shaping up as a more potent entity than the Quad. Its focus is clearly hard security, it is not shy of naming China, and its military interoperability and reciprocal access are far more advanced since all members are U.S. allies. The Squad is also better geographically located—closer to sensitive theaters in the Indo-Pacific than the Quad could ever be.

The recent Trump-Xi summit in Beijing has extended the U.S.-China economic truce and may also cool tensions on the fraught Taiwan issue. But the long-haul future of U.S.-China hard-security relations is being defined in the East and South China seas, where assertive activities by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy continue unabated. The Quad will muddle along but will likely remain in a marginal role as the U.S.-China rivalry develops.