What the Quad actually does — Tanvi Madan's reading

Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at Brookings and a foundational scholar of US-India relations, has been the most cited analyst of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue since its 2017 revival as a working group and its 2021 elevation to leaders-level summits. Her core argument across multiple Brookings papers and her 2020 book *Fateful Triangle* is that the Quad's function is best understood by looking at what its working groups produce, not at the summit communiqués.

By Madan's tracking, the Quad has 11 active working groups as of 2025. The substantive outputs include the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (launched 2022), which provides space-based commercial maritime imagery to regional partners; the Quad Vaccine Partnership that manufactured and distributed Johnson & Johnson doses across the Indo-Pacific in 2021-2022; the Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group that has produced joint principles on semiconductors, biotech, and AI; and the Quad Infrastructure Coordination Group as an alternative-to-BRI signalling vehicle.

Madan emphasises three structural features that distinguish the Quad from a NATO-style alliance. First, no Article 5-equivalent obligation. Second, India's deliberate non-alignment posture — Madan has documented how Indian officials consistently describe the Quad as a 'diplomatic platform' rather than a 'security architecture'. Third, the asymmetric posture of the four members vis-à-vis China — the US, Japan, and Australia have the China relationship structured around competition; India has it structured around managed rivalry, including an unresolved border conflict, and is not interested in a framework that pre-commits its China posture.

Her assessment of the 2025 Quad summit — held in Washington — is that the working-group track is steadily delivering, the leaders-level signalling is doing what it is supposed to do, and the persistent Western press framing of the Quad as a wobbling alliance misreads what it was set up to be. The Quad's strength, Madan argues, is precisely that it does not require what India will not give.

­The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India was first proposed by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2007, lapsed by 2008 under Indian and Australian withdrawal, and was revived from 2017 through senior-officials-level meetings, then elevated to foreign-ministers level in 2019 and to heads-of-government level at the March 2021 virtual summit. The institutional trajectory has been steadily upward across the post-2017 period, with annual leaders-level meetings hosted in rotation (Washington 2021, Tokyo 2022, Sydney 2023, Wilmington 2024).

Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project at Brookings and author of *Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations During the Cold War* (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), has been the most consistent Indian-side analyst of the Quad's evolution. Her reading, developed across multiple Foreign Affairs essays and Brookings working papers, is that the Quad's institutional value rests in its working groups rather than in the leaders' communiqués: the maritime domain awareness initiative, the critical and emerging technologies track, the vaccine partnership, the infrastructure coordination, the climate working group. Each is a discrete operational workstream with its own deliverables and its own implementation cadence.

The Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, announced at the May 2022 Tokyo Summit, is the working-group output that has produced the most operational signal. The initiative provides near-real-time fusion of commercial satellite imagery, automatic identification system data, and other sources to participating Indo-Pacific partner countries' fusion centres, allowing them to track suspect maritime activity — illegal fishing, dark-vessel traffic, interference with submarine cables — in a way that previously required national-intelligence-grade access. The partnership has scaled into the Indian Ocean (Information Fusion Centre in Gurugram), the South Pacific (the Pacific Fusion Centre), and the Southeast Asia region (the Information Fusion Centre in Singapore).

The vaccine-manufacturing partnership, announced at the March 2021 summit during the covid-era ramp, committed to producing and distributing one billion doses of covid vaccine across the Indo-Pacific region by end-2022. The partnership did not meet the dose-count target, primarily because of US export-restriction frictions on raw materials for Indian production during the spring 2021 Delta-variant surge in India. The operational lesson — that crisis-time supply chains for biologic manufacture cannot be coordinated solely through leader-level commitments — has shaped the subsequent design of the working group, which has shifted toward sustainable regional manufacturing capacity rather than crisis-response metrics.

The critical-and-emerging-technologies track has produced the principles document the four countries signed in 2022 and the technology-specific working groups (semiconductors, biotechnology, quantum, AI) that operate under it. The principles cover supply-chain transparency, technology standards-setting, talent mobility, and the protection of research enterprises from coercive influence. The track's operational outputs have been modest at the bilateral and trilateral subgroupings within the Quad rather than across all four members simultaneously, partly because India's technology policy frameworks are domestically more constrained than those of the other three.

The framing question — is the Quad a proto-NATO for the Indo-Pacific, or is it something operationally different — is what Madan addresses most directly in her published work. Her reading is that the Quad cannot become a NATO-equivalent alliance structure as long as India remains operationally non-aligned, and that the asymmetry is durable across electoral cycles in all four capitals. What the Quad can be, and on her reading is becoming, is a coordinating mechanism for capabilities, public goods, and standards-setting in the Indo-Pacific that does not require alliance-grade commitment but does substantially raise the cost to any actor seeking to coerce a regional state through the manipulation of commercial or technological dependencies.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.