The Bhutanese Leading the way.
By Harsh Pandey*
In February 1972, Richard Nixon landed in Beijing for what his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had spent two years secretly preparing — a strategic opening designed to split the Sino-Soviet bloc and buy the United States breathing room in a deteriorating Cold War. It was, by the standards of great-power statecraft, an elegant piece of work. What neither Nixon nor Kissinger fully accounted for was the possibility that the China they were opening would, over the following five decades, use the very economic integration that American policy facilitated to build the capacity required to challenge the order America had constructed. Engagement was the strategy. Deterrence was assumed to follow.
It did not follow. Or rather, it followed incompletely, intermittently, and always several steps behind the pace of Chinese ambition. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue — the grouping of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia that met for its third foreign ministers’ meeting since September 2024 in New Delhi on May 26 — is, in one reading, the institutional acknowledgement that the engagement strategy has run its course and something more structured is now required. The joint statement that emerged from Tuesday’s meeting is a useful document. It is also, if read carefully against current strategic realities, an illustration of how far the Quad still has to travel.
What did Quad say?
Start with what the meeting actually produced, because the outputs deserve to be taken seriously before they are subjected to scrutiny. The four foreign ministers — Jaishankar, Rubio, Penny Wong, and Toshimitsu Motegi — announced three concrete outcomes: a new Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Cooperation Initiative, a critical minerals framework, and the Quad’s first-ever joint infrastructure project, a port in Fiji. Rubio, speaking after the meeting, said Washington wants the Quad to move beyond being a dialogue platform and take more concrete action on issues including maritime security and critical minerals. The minerals framework will guide how to leverage economic policy tools and coordinate investment to strengthen critical minerals supply chains, including in mining, processing, and recycling — an initiative with particular significance for Japan after China halted shipments of certain minerals used in aerospace, defence, and semiconductor industries following a diplomatic dispute.
These are not trivial announcements. A common maritime operating picture, if genuinely operationalised rather than remaining an aspiration on paper, would represent a meaningful enhancement in the Quad’s collective domain awareness. The critical minerals framework addresses a real supply-chain vulnerability that Beijing has demonstrated, with its export restrictions on rare earths and specialised minerals, a clear willingness to exploit. And the Fiji port, however modest in scale, is the Quad’s first attempt at joint infrastructure delivery — a domain where it has been perennially out-competed by Chinese Belt and Road financing.
At the same time, the joint statement’s language on more pressing security questions deserves closer reading than it typically receives.
The statement expressed serious concern over the East and South China Seas, citing “dangerous and coercive actions, including interference with offshore resource development, the repeated obstruction of freedom of navigation and overflight, and dangerous manoeuvres by military aircraft and coast guard and maritime militia vessels, especially the unsafe use of water cannons and flares, and ramming or blocking actions in the South China Sea.” It also noted serious concern about the militarisation of disputed features.
Where is it lacking?
This language is direct by the standards of multilateral diplomatic documents. What it does not contain is any specification of consequence. The Quad has been expressing serious concern about South China Sea developments since at least 2021. The concern is entirely warranted. China’s method in these waters — the incremental acquisition and consolidation of position calibrated to remain below the threshold of triggering a serious collective response — has been operating for the better part of two decades, and it has been successful precisely because the gap between what the democratic world says and what it does has remained exploitable.
The inflection point was 2012. China engineered a standoff with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal, American diplomacy brokered a withdrawal arrangement, Manila withdrew, Beijing did not, and Washington decided against pressing the point. That decision communicated something important to Chinese planners: that the costs of bold incremental moves were manageable. By 2015, artificial islands with military installations had been constructed on submerged features in the Spratlys. In 2016, the international arbitral tribunal categorically rejected China’s nine-dash line. Beijing called the ruling null and void. Tuesday’s statement described that 2016 ruling as “a significant milestone and the basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties” — language that is legally accurate but carries a certain irony given that the country against which the ruling was issued has consistently refused to acknowledge its legitimacy for a decade, and the international community has found no effective mechanism to compel it to do so.
The inability to enforce that ruling was not purely a failure of will. It was partly a failure of institutional design — the absence, across four administrations and counting, of a coherent American strategy toward Chinese maritime revisionism that outlasted individual presidencies, survived changes in congressional mood, and communicated consistent red lines. Which is where the present moment becomes particularly difficult to read.
The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design
The structural problem that the Quad’s May 26 statement cannot quite paper over is this: one of its four members is currently conducting foreign policy in a manner that makes sustained, predictable alliance commitments genuinely difficult to guarantee.
American foreign policy under the current administration is characterised by a set of tendencies — transactionalism, a preference for bilateral deals over multilateral architecture, and a decision-making style that is unusually concentrated in the personality of the president and unusually susceptible to the dynamics of specific personal relationships — that sit in some structural tension with what a credible, durable alliance framework requires. Alliances derive their deterrent value from predictability. Partners plan around them. Adversaries calculate against them. The moment an alliance commitment appears contingent on the current occupant of the Oval Office’s assessment of its transactional value, its deterrent function is partially compromised — not destroyed, but degraded in ways that accumulate over time.
The specific evidence available this week makes the point concretely. Acting US Navy Secretary Hung Cao testified before the Senate that Washington has paused a fourteen-billion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan. Taipei had not been informed. Taiwanese officials discovered the pause through Senate testimony rather than diplomatic channels. More revealing was the presidential explanation: Trump indicated publicly that he might use the arms sale as a negotiating concession with Beijing. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said — about weapons that a partner needs to deter the country that had, in the preceding days, deployed a hundred vessels around the First Island Chain and sent a coastguard ship to assert sovereignty over Taiwan’s outer islands. Washington has also delayed Tomahawk deliveries to Japan and held back an arms package to South Korea. The Middle East campaign’s munitions demands are creating sequential shortfalls across an Indo-Pacific alliance architecture that cannot comfortably absorb them at this moment.
This pattern is not unique to the current administration in all its details, but it has been intensified by it. The broader American foreign policy approach since January 2025 has been marked by a willingness to use alliance relationships as leverage in bilateral negotiations with third parties — treating, in effect, the security guarantees extended to partners as assets to be monetised or traded rather than as commitments whose unconditional quality is precisely the source of their strategic value. An America that tells Taiwan its weapons might be withheld as a bargaining chip with Beijing, that tells Japan its Tomahawk delivery is delayed because of priorities elsewhere, and that conducts its most significant China diplomacy through a personal summit whose outcomes are not fully shared with Quad partners is an America that is, structurally, a less reliable anchor for an Indo-Pacific security architecture than the one the Quad was designed around.
The Quad had lost some momentum last year after failing to hold a leaders’ summit, amid friction between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi over US tariffs and other matters. That friction was not incidental. It reflected the broader reality that when American trade policy is conducted through tariff announcements that treat allies and adversaries with similar instruments of pressure, the countries on the receiving end — including India — draw conclusions about the reliability of the partnership that extend beyond the trade domain. New Delhi has pressed for a Trump visit to India, a trip that would probably be tied to a Quad summit. The fact that this visit has not materialised, and that the leaders’ summit remains unscheduled, is partly a reflection of the difficulty of anchoring the Quad’s institutional calendar to a White House whose foreign policy attention is distributed according to presidential interest rather than strategic priority.
None of this means that Rubio, who has articulated a coherent Indo-Pacific strategy and whose presence at Tuesday’s meeting was substantive, does not understand the stakes. It means that the gap between the Secretary of State’s strategic understanding and the President’s transactional instincts is itself a variable in how allied capitals assess American reliability — and that the allied capitals are watching both, simultaneously, and drawing appropriately complicated conclusions.
Some Course Correction or What?
The joint statement’s maritime security provisions acquire a specific context when placed alongside events of the preceding 72 hours. On Saturday, Taiwan’s Coast Guard reported a Chinese coastguard vessel heading toward the Pratas Islands, a Taiwanese-administered atoll at the northern entrance to the South China Sea. The two sides engaged in a radio confrontation over sovereignty. The Chinese vessel eventually withdrew. More significantly, Taiwan’s National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu had disclosed that China deployed more than 100 vessels across the First Island Chain in the days immediately following the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing.
The operational timing is not coincidental. Beijing’s deployment pattern reflects a specific reading of the post-summit moment — a reading that the Trump-Xi meeting had produced enough goodwill on the American side to create space for Chinese assertiveness without triggering a serious response. Whether that reading is correct remains to be tested. But the fact that Beijing made it, and acted on it at scale, within days of a meeting between the two presidents, tells you something about how Chinese planners currently assess the deterrent weight of American commitments in the region.
The Quad joint statement does not reference the Pratas incident. This is understandable given the diplomatic sensitivities around Taiwan’s formal status. But the broader pattern — probing Taiwan’s outer islands while deploying significant naval assets in the immediate post-summit period, timed to coincide with a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting — suggests that Beijing’s assessment of the grouping’s deterrent value remains, at present, modest.
For India specifically, the joint statement’s counterterrorism language carries particular weight in the current context. The Quad “unequivocally condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, including cross-border terrorism,” and specifically condemned the April 22, 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam. Jaishankar’s public remarks went further, stating that nations subject to terrorist attacks have the right to defend themselves — language that, following Operation Sindoor, carries a specific message about the international legitimacy of India’s response to Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism.
What the joint statement does not address, and what the Quad has consistently declined to engage with directly, is the China-Pakistan axis as a coordinated strategic arrangement. This reticence is diplomatically intelligible. It is also strategically costly for India. The June 2020 Galwan Valley clashes — twenty Indian soldiers dead in hand-to-hand combat on the Line of Actual Control, the first deaths on that border since 1975 — demonstrated that India faces not one but two interconnected strategic pressures. CPEC runs through territory India claims. Pakistan’s security establishment has functioned, for years, as a force multiplier that keeps Indian attention pinned westward while Chinese pressure is applied from the north. The Quad’s counterterrorism language addresses a symptom. The structural arrangement that enables it remains outside the frame.
The critical minerals framework is where Tuesday’s meeting made its most durable strategic contribution, and it is worth understanding why this particular initiative has legs that some earlier Quad deliverables lacked. The framework is seen as particularly significant for Japan after China halted shipments of minerals used in aerospace, defence, and semiconductor industries following a diplomatic dispute. China’s use of export controls on specialised minerals as a coercive instrument is a form of grey-zone pressure that sits in a strategic domain — economic coercion — where the Quad’s earlier frameworks were poorly equipped to respond. A collective approach that pools investment and coordinates policy across four economies with complementary resource endowments — India with significant rare earth deposits, Australia with substantial lithium and cobalt reserves, Japan with processing technology, and the United States with capital and downstream demand — represents a genuine structural counter to a genuine structural vulnerability.
Conclusion
There is a broader structural observation that the May 26 statement, read against the week’s strategic context, makes unavoidable. The Quad’s core problem — the gap between what it says and what it can credibly commit to doing — has two distinct sources. One is institutional: the absence of a mutual defence obligation, the lack of a doctrine of graduated collective response, the undefined distance between “serious concern” in a joint statement and actual collective action. The other is political: the current character of American foreign policy, which is too transactional, too personalised, and too subject to the bilateral calculus of the Trump-Xi relationship to function as the predictable anchor that an effective Indo-Pacific security architecture requires.
These two problems interact. The institutional deficit could be partially compensated for by credible American leadership — by a Washington that communicated, consistently across administrations, that its Indo-Pacific commitments were not contingent on the bilateral state of US-China relations at any given moment. Conversely, the institutional deficit makes the political problem more damaging — because when American reliability is in question, the absence of treaty-level commitments leaves partner nations with no floor beneath their security calculations.
Neither problem is irresolvable. The institutional one requires political decisions about the scope of collective commitment that the Quad’s members have been unwilling to make, partly because the most consequential of those decisions belongs to Washington. The political one is, in the nature of democratic politics, cyclical — the current administration’s foreign policy dispositions are not permanent features of the American strategic landscape. What is genuinely concerning is the possibility that the window within which those decisions matter — the period before the regional balance has shifted sufficiently that no amount of institutional consolidation can recover deterrent credibility — is narrower than the Quad’s current pace of development assumes.
Nixon opened China expecting engagement to produce a stakeholder in the existing order. The assumption was reasonable. It proved incorrect. The Quad was built expecting that dialogue, coordination, and demonstrated cohesion would produce deterrence. That assumption is also reasonable. Whether it proves correct depends on decisions not yet made — primarily in Washington, but also in New Delhi, Tokyo, and Canberra — about what this grouping is ultimately prepared to do together when expressions of serious concern are no longer enough.
Tuesday’s meeting in New Delhi was a meaningful step. It was not, given the strategic moment, a sufficient one.
*The Author is a PhD Candidate in the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. He is also a Life Member of the Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi.