The Once Wobbly Quad Is Here to Stay

Derek Grossman

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“The Quad is here to stay,” U.S. President Joe Biden confidently proclaimed during the group's final summit of his tenure in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 21. To most observers, Biden's claim may seem overly optimistic, especially because the Quad—a security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—has fallen apart once before, in 2008. But this time, for a number of reasons, the Quad is likely to endure well into the future.

For starters, the Quad has already weathered domestic power transitions—the key driver of its demise the first time around—in three of its participant states. The most important Quad participant, the United States, shifted from Republican to Democratic administrations (former President Donald Trump to Biden) with no corresponding downgrade in Quad participation. In fact, quite the opposite happened: After the Trump team revived the Quad in 2017, the Biden administration participated in not only the first in-person summit in 2021 but also five more summits, including two virtual ones. From the outset, the Biden team pledged to have the Quad play a “defining role in the region” in keeping China in check in the Indo-Pacific. Neither Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned on changing anything about the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy if he or she wins the election this November.

Similarly, Australia in 2022 experienced a switch from Liberal to Labour Party prime ministers (Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese), and Canberra has not dampened any of its Quad activities. Meanwhile, Japan has undergone three prime minister transitions (Shinzo Abe to Yoshihide Suga to Fumio Kishida to, now, Shigeru Ishiba), all from the Liberal Democratic Party, with no change in Tokyo's appetite to engage in the grouping. India is the only country where a domestic leadership change has not yet occurred, but even there, the opposition Indian National Congress party has not contested Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party's foreign policy, pledging before the last election in April to “uphold continuity.”