The Emerging Quad 3.0: Prioritizing a Hard Security Agenda

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On 1 July, the foreign ministers of the Quad—Australia, India, Japan and the US—convened for the second time this year in Washington, DC. While the first meeting, held just hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States, signaled the Quad's significance to the new US administration, the second meeting indicates that the Quad is entering a new phase with a renewed focus on a strategic and hard security agenda, weaning itself away from its non-traditional security priorities. This presents a departure from its previous versions: the first Quad, which collapsed in 2007, centred on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), and Quad 2.0, which was reinstated in 2017, gradually developed a broad public goods agenda.

The joint statement issued by the Quad foreign ministers after their January 2025 meeting in DC was unusually circumscribed. The group reaffirmed their "shared commitment to strengthening a Free and Open Indo-Pacific where the rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty, and territorial integrity are upheld and defended." Without explicitly naming China, as usual, the ministers registered their strong opposition to "any unilateral actions" that might seek to alter "the status quo by force or coercion" in the Indo-Pacific region. China responded to this cautioning through its Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, saying, "China's activities in relevant waters are lawful, legitimate and completely justified."

In their 1 July joint statement, the Quad foreign ministers reiterated their collective opposition to any unilateral actions seeking to upend the regional "status-quo by force or coercion"—a phrase they used more than once in the statement. While reaffirming their commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, the group underscored their "commitment to defending the rule of law, sovereignty, and territorial integrity" of the region. They underlined how the maritime domain underpins the security and prosperity of the region, implying that the Quad views any unilateral exertions in the maritime domain, particularly by China, with stern caution.

Even though the July statement still does not mention China, it stressed ‘concerns’ over the situation in the East and South China Seas. Some of the Quad's concerns pertaining to the region listed are:

The interference with offshore resource development, the repeated obstruction of the freedoms of navigation and overflight, and the dangerous maneuvers by military aircraft and coast guard and maritime militia vessels, especially the unsafe use of water cannons and ramming or blocking actions in the South China Sea… We are seriously concerned about the militarization of disputed features.

The Quad sees these actions as ‘dangerous and provocative’ and threatens ‘peace and stability in the region’. In effect, China's perceived belligerence and excesses in the South and East China Seas make up a bulk of the concerns for the Quad.

Further, the foreign ministers condemned North Korea's destabilizing ballistic missile launches, its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its malicious cyber activity, including cryptocurrency theft. The ministers called upon all UN Member States to uphold and implement the UNSC sanctions against North Korea to prohibit the transfer of arms and related material. In yet another veiled reference to China and Russia, the Quad expressed "deep concern about countries that are deepening military cooperation with North Korea, which directly undermines the global nonproliferation regime."

The Quad ministers' meeting reiterated cooperative measures to enhance maritime and regional security, promote economic prosperity and security, and critical and emerging technology and supply chains. They launched the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative to secure and diversify critical minerals supply chains. This is in response to their growing concerns over "the abrupt constriction and future reliability of key supply chains, specifically for critical minerals," primarily due to China's growing dominance in the region. The Quad insists that a diversified and reliable global supply chain is imperative to avoid potential coercion and monopoly of price by ‘one country’. China is yet to issue an official response to these remarks (at the time of this writing) but one can imagine these indictments will have very little curtailing effect on its military and ‘civilian’ activities in the region.

Additionally, the Quad expressed its continued efforts to strengthen maritime law enforcement collaboration through training, legal dialogues, and Coast Guard cooperation. This should also be read as a countermeasure to China's belligerence in the Indo-Pacific waters, as the Quad holds freedom of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the sea as critical. They also reiterated as ‘significant’ the 2016 ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal, which dismissed China's ‘historic rights’ claims in the South China Sea as invalid, holding it as the basis for resolving the conflict peacefully.

In addition to these hard security and strategic goals, the Quad foreign ministers did reiterate their keenness to advance humanitarian assistance and emergency response capabilities across the Indo-Pacific. They collectively raised over USD 30 million in humanitarian assistance for victims of the Myanmar earthquake in March 2025. They announced the first field training exercise under the Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network and confirmed the launch of the Quad Ports of the Future Partnership later this year. This shows that the Quad continues to have the element of public goods on its agenda.

However, the non-security agenda of the Quad is significantly narrowing. One glaring omission is any mention of its climate-related initiatives. The group instituted the Quad Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Package (Q-CHAMP) in 2022, containing a critical measures to mitigate and address the challenges emerging from climate change in the region. Initiatives in the package include the Climate and Information Service Taskforce, the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), and the Quad Shipping Taskforce. It emphasized knowledge sharing to promote clean and renewable energies such as hydrogen and ammonia, methane reduction, Carbon Capturing, Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS), and Carbon Recycling. These measures were intended to assist partners in the region, including vulnerable Island States, in coping with the vagaries of the climate crisis, which is their biggest existential security challenge. It remains unclear if these missions will continue, or if the Quad’s Climate Working Group will remain functional.

It is evident that the Quad, in its new incarnation under the second Trump Administration, seeks to prioritize hard security issues. The few enduring non-traditional security efforts are also moved by strategic calculations. Some Quad watchers may see this as an encouraging development. However, it is vital to bear in mind that the group is hardly monolithic and may not successfully muster the collective political will to tame the strategic turmoil in the region, particularly those arising from China's power excursions. India's reluctance to engage in any direct confrontation with China, Japan's and Australia's economic dependence on China, and even the highly unpredictable current US foreign policy account for this uncertainty.

The Quad cannot securitize itself to the point that it becomes unable to operate or realize its original goal of securing a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific. It must strive to find a balance between its emerging realpolitik rhetoric and the allocation of public goods, which includes addressing the pressing needs of the most vulnerable people in the region. While it remains to be seen how the Quad evolves under the new US administration, it is of interest to see if (and how) the other three partners can keep alive the pursuit of public goods they had previously championed.

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