How Trump Put A Key Asia-pacific Alliance ‘on Life Support’

President Donald Trump has spent two years pursuing trade wars, aloof diplomacy and an embrace of Beijing that have undermined the four-nation Asia-Pacific alliance created to counter a rising China.

Next week, he’s set to sit down together with the leaders of the “Quad” for the first time ever.

The meeting with the heads of Japan, India and Australia — scheduled for Monday on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in the Philippines — comes as the other three members of the Quad alliance bristle at what they see as Trump’s dismissiveness and mistreatment of them.

“The Quad is on life support,” said a Washington-based Asian diplomat, granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of their comments. “It’s not dead yet, but it needs strong leadership.”

A weakened Quad is good news for China. While the two-decade-old grouping has mostly focused on collaboration in areas such as climate, health and infrastructure development, in recent years it has moved toward a regional security focus through joint Coast Guard and naval exercises. Beijing has labeled the bloc an “Indo-Pacific NATO.”

“The Quad represents an opportunity to collectively confront the Chinese Communist Party, and it’s being missed,” said retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, former director of operations at U.S. Pacific Command. “Trump’s mistreatment of all three countries has prevented any progress in collectively pulling India into more direct participation in confronting Chinese aggression outside the subcontinent.”

The White House defended Trump’s leadership of the bloc.

“No administration has done more to advance Quad cooperation than the Trump administration,” said White House spokesperson Olivia Wales.

Trump had a very different approach to the Quad in his first term. While the alliance was created in 2007, it went mostly dormant the year after amid internal squabbling and concerns about provoking Beijing. Trump revived it in 2017 to address growing concerns about China’s increasing economic, diplomatic and military heft in the Indo-Pacific, though he never held a leaders’ summit.

Former President Joe Biden gave significant time to the group, participating in six Quad leader meetings — two of them virtual — during his presidency. He hosted the last meeting of the Quad in Delaware in 2024.

In his second term, Trump has relegated engagement with the Quad to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Trump doesn't invest in these partnerships the way Biden did. And consistent with that is the fact that Trump saw no value in having a Quad summit” until this month, said Arzan Tarapore, former Australian defense liaison to the U.S. during the Obama administration. “There's not that White House pressure to advance the Quad.”

Trump’s disdain for multilateral organizations has been a feature of his second term. He has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the United Nations’ climate convention, backed an effort aimed at “dismantling” the International Criminal Court (a body the U.S. has never been a member of), and has repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO.

Trump hasn’t publicly criticized the Quad, but his lack of interest in the group has spooked its members, even as lower-level work has continued.

Rubio has convened five meetings with Quad foreign ministers, and the State Department’s engagement with the group has produced initiatives to bolster energy supply chains, upgrade port facilities in Fiji and integrate the four countries’ surveillance capabilities. Those discussions have transformed the Quad “from a place we just meet and talk about problems to a place we identify areas to work together on,” Rubio told reporters last month.

Quad partners are less enthusiastic.

“Despite the efforts of Secretary Rubio, ambition has gone way down in the Quad,” said Nisha Biswal, former assistant secretary of State for south and central Asian affairs in the Obama administration, who is still in touch with policymakers in the region. “There’s a desire to keep the Quad alive, so that it can become perhaps reprioritized down the road, but not necessarily to put a huge amount of effort and ambition into the Quad structure at the current moment.”

That absence of engagement at the highest levels could derail tentative moves to expand its focus to include cooperation on regional defense as both India and Japan grapple with worsening border tensions with China.

“If you want the Quad to be more than a talk shop, you need that signal from the boss,” said Jonathan Czin, a former CIA China analyst, now at the Brookings Institution. “Beijing sees anything less than U.S. participation at the head-of-state level as a sign that it's stepping back from the Quad.”

India’s dismay over a U.S. trade agreement that fell apart in 2025 — saddling it with 50% tariffs — derailed a planned Quad leaders’ summit in New Delhi the same year. U.S. levies on most Indian imports eased to 18% in February. Trump required Tokyo to invest $550 billion — more than 10% of the country’s GDP in 2024 — in the U.S. as a condition for lower tariffs on automobiles and other products. Levies on Australian imports — mostly tariff-free prior to April 2025 under a U.S.-Australia free trade pact — are at 12.5%.

For Quad partners, “the tariff and trade salvos by President Trump and his lieutenants have been very difficult to stomach,” said Jane Hardy, former leader of the Australian embassy’s congressional office in Washington.

Trump has repeatedly criticized Australia for its unwillingness to send naval forces to support U.S. operations to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. And he humiliated former Australian Ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd in an Oval Office meeting last year that led to Rudd’s removal in January.

The Australian Embassy referred queries to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s relationship with Modi — once a bromance punctuated with bear hugs and private tours of the Taj Mahal — has curdled over administration actions that have eroded New Delhi’s trust in Washington.

The Indian embassy declined to comment.

The Trump administration’s muted response to China’s intensifying economic coercion campaign against Japan has meanwhile tested Tokyo’s commitment to the Quad. Beijing’s yearlong targeted economic punishment has clobbered Japan’s tourism sector, cut rare earth exports and placed dozens of Japanese companies on Chinese export restriction watch lists. But Trump has kept mum on those moves.

“Trump has undermined the Quad through a lack of support for Japan in pushing back against that pressure,” the Asian diplomat said.

His silence “is a major mistake,” said Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to China in the Biden administration. “If we can't stand up vocally for the prime minister of Japan and her government, then we're weakening that alliance, and we're just giving an advantage to the Chinese, who are watching what we're saying and doing.”

The lack of White House involvement with the Quad has also drawn fire from Capitol Hill.

“I share some of the concerns of the other Quad countries and their disappointment” over Trump’s failure to engage with the group, said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), who will chair the House subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific in the next Congress.

Officials in Tokyo, Canberra and New Delhi are now looking past Trump as he enters the lame-duck phase of his presidency to gauge whether his successor will be more supportive of the group.

Quad partners are “holding out hope that perhaps a new administration, Republican or Democrat, gives them an opportunity to resuscitate it a little bit,” said Yuki Tatsumi, former special assistant for political affairs at the Japanese embassy in Washington.

But in the meantime, the Quad’s Indo-Pacific-based members are deepening bilateral ties and striking security partnerships that exclude the United States. Annual joint military exercises between Indian and Japanese forces in September included the first deployment of Japanese fighter jets to India’s airspace since World War II. Tokyo and Canberra inked a deal in August allowing Japan to test hypersonic missiles in Australia. A week later, the defense ministers of Japan, Australia and Indonesia held an inaugural trilateral meeting on military cooperation.

“None of the other three Quad members would move to actively exclude the U.S., but they're definitely actively looking at areas where they can do more together,” Tatsumi said. “They know that they can only counter potential economic pressure from China by joining forces.”