Malabar exercises show Quad prevails and thrives despite challenges

China’s discomfort grew to a considerably high level last week when, despite the turbulence in the Quad, India, the United States, Japan and Australia joined forces to participate in the annual Malabar exercise off the coast of Guam in the Northern Pacific. It was quite a sight to behold when navies from these countries sent one of their best ships and aircraft, including India, which unveiled its indigenously built Guided Missile Stealth Frigate INS Sahyadri at the drills.

On one hand, the news cycle these days is dominated by reports of continuous tensions between Quad partners, mainly India and the US, over trade and energy, and on the other hand, these countries were teaming up in the high seas, exploring how they can better pool their resources and capacities at the time of need.

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A similar spectacle was on offer in early November when India and the United States were joined by Australia and Japan as observers for Cope India 2025, which started out as a bilateral air exercise in the early 2000s between India and the United States but has now become a formal engagement for all the Quad countries.

No wonder such moments of military cooperation come as a great assurance for Quad cheerleaders across the globe who still see promise in the grouping’s collective ability to take on China and its assertive tendencies in the Indo-Pacific. So what does it mean for the long-term survival of the grouping? Is the Quad really not as dead as predicted by many, or is such an exercise more like an annual obligation shared by the Quad countries more so because of its institutionalised basis?

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Well, no one can deny the basic fact here that the idea of the Quad has indeed taken a lot of damage in the recent months. For all the optimism surrounding the naval drills at Guam, one pinching truth is that the Quad summit scheduled for 2025 did not take place this year.

Although there were two major foreign ministers’ meetings that took place in January and July in Washington but with zero interaction between top leaders of the respective Quad countries, the messaging and the optics did not fall in the grouping’s favour at all in 2025. What instead took place was a very public unfolding of trade-related friction between the two biggest Quad powers, India and the United States.

In fact, the early momentum following US President Donald Trump’s inauguration and PM Modi’s February visit soon withered away as Trump started name-calling India as ‘Tariff King’ and ‘Tariff Abuser’ over the latter’s protectionist measures in place to secure its vulnerable economy. The downward trajectory from that point was actually very swift, as Trump’s claim in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor that he played the peacemaker between India and Pakistan did not go down well at all in New Delhi. Despite Trump’s childish attempts to make the same claim umpteen times now, India maintained a dignified silence.

What is more worrisome is that US-India tensions extended beyond just trade this year, with several members of Trump’s cabinet also indicting India for purchasing Russian oil, with them even calling the country a ‘war profiteer’, not to mention how much America’s own economy has benefited by selling weapons to Ukraine in the name of military aid. 2025 will definitely go down as the year with the sharpest fall in India-US relations in the 21st century so far.

Here Trump’s transactionalist foreign policy must take the maximum blame because only he warmed up to Pakistan, especially its military leadership, in a year when India faced brutal terror attacks sponsored by the Pakistani state. The return of Pakistan in Washington’s strategic calculus, combined with Trump’s ill-conceived idea of equating a perpetrator of terror with its victim and his claim that he got India and Pakistan to make peace after Operation Sindoor, are developments that can’t be brushed aside by an already apprehensive New Delhi.

It took a quarter of a century for India to bury the ghosts of Cold War-era treatment, and here the Trump administration brought all those nightmares back in the span of just a year. So obviously when many experts in the strategic circles say that India and US ties will never be the same again or that Quad has become the prime victim of their tensions, one can easily sense there is some logic to this side of the debate.

However, countries have a life cycle of centuries where years are sometimes just nothing but blips. For all the pessimism surrounding Quad, the truth is that China’s rise is very real, and its manifestation in the form of an expansionist spree across the Indo-Pacific is also a challenge. Thus, even if one US president, Trump, professes a liking for the idea of G2, where the US and China co-manage the international system, the possibility of other powers accepting this is bleak. The fact is that India has an unsettled boundary dispute in the Himalayas with China, Japan has stakes in the East China Sea, and Australia has its entire backyard of Pacific Islands to protect from any further Chinese interference.

Thus, the US may be willing to hang up its boots and accept China as an equal, but for other Quad countries, the ramifications of China’s rise are huge and threaten their very survival. This is the reason why, the US’s apathy for the Quad aside, other countries within the grouping have continued to shore up their cooperation this year.

India and Australia had their inaugural defence ministers dialogue this year, and India and Japan reasserted their commitment to Quad during PM Modi’s Japan visit in August. In fact, Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, in her very first phone call with PM Modi, explicitly vowed to work under the quadrilateral arrangement to realise a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific”.

Hence, regardless of the waning American commitment to the Quad, the grouping has now assumed a life of its own. Many of its initiatives, especially the defence cooperation, have got institutionalised now. Here the Malabar exercises and the Cope India exercise are a case in point, as despite all the respective countries maintaining that the Quad is not a military alliance, they still come together every year to play out responses to possible scenarios of Chinese aggression.

In that sense, Quad may not be the talk of town anymore, but the lack of harsh spotlight has also taken performance pressure off its back. Now the member countries can plan and execute more impactful initiatives that can effectively balance an assertive China and ensure a stable and peaceful Indo-Pacific.

The lesson to learn for Quad watchers this year is that this grouping has a history of rising from the ashes. What started out as a promising collaboration between India, the US, Japan and Australia in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami soon turned dead when each of the powers adopted a softer approach to China. But it was China’s aggressive tactics in the South China Sea, its repeated incursions on the Himalayan border with India and its economic coercion of Australia that changed their tack.

The United States, on the other hand, has always been a subdued advocate of the Quad, with pressure from its allies having played a much bigger role than maybe its own organic interest. But now the Quad as well as the participating countries besides the US have found their own strength of conviction in cooperating with each other. An example of this we saw in the Malabar 2025 exercise as well as in the growing cooperation between the rest of the counties, proving that the Quad will live on, no matter in which shape.

(The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)