Quietly, but surely, life is ebbing away from the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad).

From its post-2004 tsunami beginnings, the Quad has existed largely in a state of policy indetermination, documented only by dull communiqués and faux-fun photographs of the politicians who issued them. Such longevity as it had was sustained by desultory meetings of defence and foreign ministers, and an occasional heads of government meeting, usually in the shadows of some other more important event. Most Quad meetings were hastily convened and opportunistic, driven not by disaster recovery, which at least had humanitarian relevance, but by the strategic objective of “containing” China.

From the outset, the Quad’s barrackers were totally unable to understand that China is not for containing, to channel Margaret Thatcher. More significantly, its barrackers — many of them self-appointed doyens in the self-defining world of “international relations” — were innocent of any deep understanding of history or its cultural imperatives.

Enduring institutions are not defined by shared threat perceptions. Rather, they represent and realise the powerful combination of enduring interests and enduring cultural, institutional, political and structural alignments. Unlike NATO and ANZUS, built around collective defence, CENTO (the Central Treaty Organisation) and SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation) were ill-considered and poorly-engineered attempts at containment of global communism and its backers, the Soviet Union and China. Their ill-assorted members fitted badly in unfit-for-purpose associations.

The transience of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), the last Australian hurrah for which took place in Canberra in 1972 before it was finally dissolved in 1977, was directly a consequence of the irreconcilable cultural, political, social and strategic differences between its members.

For a start, only two of its members, Thailand and the Philippines, were Southeast Asian. Pakistan was sliding towards implosion. And the fading colonial powers, Britain and France, were quite simply no longer relevant. For their part, Australia and New Zealand were enthusiastic acolytes for America’s efforts to control the post-World War II and post-colonial carve-up of Asia.

SEATO book-ended the Vietnam War – a testament to its ambition and its futility.

Since its independence from Britain in 1947, India, with its pivotal location, strategic mass, population, enterprise and military tradition, has excited the infatuation of each of the major powers and not a few of the “middle” ones such as Australia. For us, curry, cricket and the Commonwealth have been emblematic of economic and security hopes that have ebbed and flowed with the political manoeuvrings of the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

With its economic and political reconstruction in the decades following World War II, Japan also came to be seen as a suitable strategic consort of the West in its increasingly desperate efforts to balance, contain and limit China’s East Asian ascendancy. The election of Shinzo Abe as Japan’s hawkish prime minister in 2006 fortuitously afforded the opportunity to transform the Quad from an aid organisation between four democracies to a security partnership built around economic strength (together they accounted for one third of global GDP), shared interests and norms that, in concert, could counter China’s regional influence. The election of the Rudd Government in 2007 saw the Quad fall on hard times. Rudd did not at the time support a containment approach to dealing with China. But Abe’s re-election in 2012, his persistence and the 2017 arrival of the Trump presidency saw a restoration of the Quad’s fortunes.

Trump was, and remains, keen on ganging-up on China, as was Abe and Australia’s Scott Morrison. Modi, consistent with the long-term thread of Indian foreign policy, prefers to keep a finger in every pie. Just as he will not dance to China’s tune, neither will Modi dance to America’s.

Modi was happy enough to flirt with the Quad until Trump overplayed his hand, a procession of Japanese prime ministers wanted a more nuanced approach to Japan’s always tricky relationship with China, and an Australian Labor Government wanted to square the circle of its security dependency on America and its economic dependency on China. For its part, China managed a calibrated and unusually nuanced response to Trump’s arbitrary and often petulant use of tariffs as a foreign policy weapon.

The Quad’s impending obsequies were nowhere more clearly enacted than in President Xi’s and Prime Minister Modi’s demonstration of convenient economic affection at the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit in Tianjin in September 2025. While American commentators have made much of Modi’s absence from China’s Victory Day parade, Modi’s distaste for China’s hyper-militarised nationalism does not preclude his acceptance of China’s economic ascendancy in Asia.

India has long favoured multipolarity and non-alignment to safeguard its independence and sovereignty. India is unconstrained by the security-economy binary that so dominates Australian and American thinking, and the thinking of Japan’s conservatives. Rather, India’s foreign and security policy has long subscribed to the view that the economic, political, security and societal dimensions of international relations are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

But the Quad’s passing will not be freighted in pomp or grand memorials, far less the spectacle of a funeral pyre. Its slow disintegration will be left to the well-fed vultures of oblivion. As Tennyson wrote, “Our little systems have their day/They have their day and cease to be."

The Quad has served whatever purpose it might have had, since India will not be anyone’s cats-paw. Nor does the vague geostrategic construct “Indo-Pacific” retain much currency when the focus of the real power competition is the Asia-Pacific region, where China and the US are hell-bent on a head-to-head confrontation. In this confrontation, Japan will retreat to its constitutional defence of non-aggression.

There can be no winner in a clash between America and China. Australia should resist the call for groupings the only purpose of which is to contain. The best option is mutual accommodation, co-existence and dialogue. And here, India is on the money.

Pearls and Irritations recommends:

Republished from The Australian, 4 November 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.