The challenge of holding the Quad together

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Australian Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong and Japan Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi. File. Photo: X/@SenatorWong via ANI. Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Atlanta, the U.S.

Secretary of State announced that the leaders of the four Quad countries — India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. — are expected to meet in Manila in November, on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit. The announcement is significant, as this would be the first summit-level meeting of the Quad leaders since Donald Trump began his second term as U.S.

President. It would also be the first such summit attended by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi since she assumed office. The last Quad Leaders’ Summit was held in Wilmington in 2024, when Joe Biden was U.S. President and Fumio Kishida was Japan’s Prime Minister.

While India was expected to host the subsequent Quad Leaders’ Summit, the grouping underwent a period of intense strategic turbulence in 2025, on account of Washington’s shifting geopolitical priorities and changing political dynamics in its bilateral relations with Quad members, especially India.

However, this did not result in complete collapse of the grouping. Apart from the leader-level summit, the group has remained successful in continuing its operational synergies in its various initiatives. This was most evident in the elevation of the Quad’s Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness initiative to the Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration framework, launched in New Delhi in May 2026, following the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting.