Since it was first conceived over two decades ago, the Quad’s obituary has been penned time and again by commentators and strategic rivals alike. 

Following its revival in 2017, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously predicted the grouping between Australia, the United States, Japan and India would “dissipate like sea foam.” More recently, one Australian analyst observed in November 2025, “the Quad is either dead or on life support so deep there are few signs of life.”

A bungled vaccine rollout, diplomatic spats, and an enduring “coherence problem” have done little to prove its critics wrong. Since the advent of Trump 2.0, India-U.S. tensions have threatened to undo decades of quiet diplomacy aimed at anchoring India in a U.S.-aligned Indo-Pacific, while the wars in Iran and Ukraine have pulled into sharp focus the daylight in strategic outlook among the four Quad members.

Yet, perhaps most glaring is the lack of a leaders’ level summit since September 2024. Leaders’ meetings motivate bureaucracies, offer a closed-door forum for candid discussion, and serve a vital signaling function to regional partners. They were an annual event under the Biden administration, which elevated the Quad as a core pillar of the Indo-Pacific security architecture.

But the absence of a summit shouldn’t be overstated as evidence of the Quad’s demise.

While the four leaders have not met since Trump’s second inauguration, practical Quad work has continued in the interim. Indeed, in the first year of Trump’s term, Quad countries continued to have at least one engagement every month at the working group level.

This includes the four countries coordinating support in the wake of the March 2025 Myanmar earthquake, conducting the first collaborative coast guard efforts in June 2025, launching the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative in July 2025, as well as hosting the third meeting of the Quad Counterterrorism Working Group, the first Field Training Exercise of the Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network, and the Quad Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response Tabletop Exercise and Strategic Meeting, which took place in December 2025. 

Last month, the Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New Delhi brought a spate of announcements – from commitments to advancing port infrastructure in Fiji to the launch of new initiatives on critical minerals and maritime surveillance.

The regular tempo of on-the-ground cooperation suggests that the Quad – despite its thin institutional structure – may in fact be insulated from higher level political volatility. Reinforcing these working level relationships could prove to be its best path to survival through turbulent geopolitical times.

With this in mind, in February 2026, the United States Studies Center hosted the second Quad Track-1.5 Leadership Dialogue in Sydney, Australia. The Chatham House dialogue convened three dozen Australian, American, Japanese, and Indian officials, experts, academics, industry stakeholders, and policy researchers to dissect the state of play for the Quad and pathways forward in a new strategic era.

From the discussions, it was clear that the Quad has struggled to deliver on many of its announcements, which participants viewed as a gift to the grouping’s critics and strategic rivals. As one aptly put, the Quad appears to be “afraid to fail, but also afraid to succeed.”

Participants argued that the Quad must now focus its “sprawling” agenda, and double down on a limited number of priority areas where it can deliver meaningful outcomes for regional partners.

So, which opportunities hold the greatest potential for the Quad?

Maritime security stood out as arguably the “most important contribution” the Quad can make in terms of socializing habits of day-to-day cooperation. Participants were clear on the overall effects the four maritime powers should aim to generate: as one surmised, “The Quad needs to be an instrument of collective deterrence, and if required, collective defense.”

But the Quad does not need to reinvent the wheel to have impact. Many of its existing activities are “security adjacent” – though mostly framed as public goods and humanitarian assistance – and have transferability to a harder power deterrence agenda. Key examples include the Indo-Pacific Logistics Network, which is a significant development given its ability to foster shared logistics capabilities, and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness. The annual Malabar naval exercise also shows that cooperation between the four maritime powers does not need to be explicitly Quad branded. 

Going forward, participants agreed that the Quad countries should move toward more “real-time data sharing” across the Indo-Pacific. Ultimately, the objective should be for the sharing of logistics and capabilities to become “utterly unremarkable,” particularly with India. This was characterized as a decades-long project of building a culture of grassroots cooperation in the civil bureaucracies as well as military services through understanding differing systems.

As participants noted, this maritime security agenda cannot be divorced from the port infrastructure that underpins trade, data, and energy flows in the Indo-Pacific. Investment in ports is a strategic tool that can transform economies and enable smaller nations to maintain their agency and security. In 2022, the Quad countries pledged over $50 billion in Indo-Pacific investments by 2027, and in 2025 India hosted the Quad Regional Ports and Transportation Conference under the Ports of the Future Partnership, focused on supporting high-quality port infrastructure across the region. 

Yet, translating these commitments into operational benefits for Quad countries and regional partners remains a challenge. And the Quad’s combined port infrastructure investments in the Indian Ocean to date (approximately $3 billion) still fall short of China’s total contributions in the region, which total $4 billion.

Together, the Quad members could leverage Australia’s regulatory and capacity building expertise, U.S. financing and security capabilities, Japan’s experience in high quality infrastructure investment, and India’s regional access, to deliver transparent, digitally advanced, and environmentally sustainable ports in the Indian Ocean. 

Compared to the Quad’s initial standing as an ad-hoc mechanism for humanitarian aid cooperation, participants described critical minerals as a “boiling frog” situation and a “wicked” problem with no easy solutions. There was broad consensus that public-private partnerships will be vital in addressing this challenge. Participants floated a range of options to strengthen private sector engagement, which could be incentivized through mechanisms such as buyer’s clubs, pooled financing arrangements, and renewed momentum for the waning Quad Investor Network 

Similarly, participants emphasized how the Quad is well-positioned to forge norms of responsible behavior in critical and emerging technologies. The grouping could serve as a valuable forum for consensus-building on issues such as the regulation of space activities and subsea cable sabotage, laying the groundwork for future legally binding mechanisms. Other priority areas include scaling digital infrastructure projects – such as the Australia-CyberCX partnership – to respond to regional demand and position Quad countries as collaborative, federated suppliers across the security stack. 

Since its resurgence under the first Trump administration, the Quad has endured multiple election cycles across all four capitals and proven to be a resilient and nimble grouping. Yet the minilateral’s evolution hinges on its ability to move from ambition to delivery, and demonstrate why it remains fit for purpose in a time of profound geopolitical change.

There is a clear opening to deepen cooperation on maritime security, port infrastructure, and critical mineral and technology supply chains. If the four nations do not seize this opportunity to build a clear value proposition – and deliver tangible outcomes for the region – the Quad risks proving its critics right.