On his first full day as U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio met with the foreign ministers of the fellow Quad nations – India, Japan and Australia – and issued a joint statement committing to “advancing the work” of the Indo-Pacific grouping. Rubio’s decision to begin his tenure with a Quad gathering reinforced the signal sent by a number of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks: that the incoming administration will continue focusing on the Indo-Pacific region, as Trump did in his first term. The choice of Rubio, known to be quite critical of China, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, amongst others, demonstrates a commitment to remain engaged in the region to deter Chinese belligerence.
Despite President Trump’s distrust of alliances, his administration’s priorities – preserving America’s technological advantage, bolstering supply chains, and strengthening trade to counter China’s influence – will all require working with partners in the region. Under former U.S President Joe Biden, the Quad set out a broader vision of security and human-centric development in the Indo-Pacific, as leaders of all four nations stated in the 2024 Wilmington Declaration. With Trump back in power, however, the Quad seems to be reverting to a strategic and military focus. Even so, several elements of the Wilmington Declaration and its broader approach ought to be retained if the United States intends to further its regional engagement through the Quad.
Trump’s Priorities
The Trump administration has vowed to reinforce America’s preeminent role in the Western hemisphere and challenge China’s expanding global influence. However, while trade tensions between the United States and China have increased with Trump’s protectionist policies, the U.S. president suggested in a statement issued prior to his inauguration that he would seek cooperation between the two countries. This sentiment was echoed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump also granted Chinese company Tik Tok an extension to comply with the divest-or-ban law enacted by his predecessor. Notwithstanding this inconsistency in Trump’s China policy, however, the number of long-standing contentious issues between Washington and Beijing – from critical technology to Taiwan to access to sea-lines of communication (SLOCs) in the region– make a rapid rapprochement unlikely and necessitate a continued U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific.
Despite President Trump’s distrust of alliances, his administration’s priorities – preserving America’s technological advantage, bolstering supply chains, and strengthening trade to counter China’s influence – will all require working with partners in the region.
Yet, this does not mean the United States will automatically turn to deepening economic engagement with other players in the region as a way of countering Chinese influence. Trump has made his disdain for free trade agreements evident, suggesting that he is unlikely to pursue broad-based multilateral economic engagement with the Indo-Pacific region, as his predecessor sought to do with the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. U.S. foreign policy in Trump’s second term is also displaying a maximalist approach towards securing American interests, even if it comes at the cost of allies, as evident through his stance on the Russia-Ukraine war and the breakdown in Washington’s ties with Europe. This U.S. approach poses both challenges and opportunities for U.S. engagement with the Quad.
The Quad’s Utility
The Quad Foreign Ministers meeting in January, hosted by Rubio, led to a joint statement that committed the grouping to “strengthening regional maritime, economic and technology security” in the Indo-Pacific region. In using this language and reflecting continuity with the Biden administration, Trump 2.0 has raised expectations that it will build on the Wilmington Declaration, which laid the ground for a wider view of security.
In fact, Trump’s past engagement with the Quad also suggests this is a possibility. The Quad was revived in 2017, during Trump’s first term, as part of a broader U.S. policy focus on the Indo-Pacific. Trump’s administration also renamed the Pacific Command of the U.S. Armed Forces to the Indo-Pacific Command, enlarging its agenda in the region. Initially a military-based grouping created in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Quad grew into a much more broad-based mechanism covering a variety of issues under both traditional and non-traditional security realms during Trump’s first term. For instance, the 2020 Quad Ministerial meeting discussed connectivity, health security, and financial implications of the pandemic. Similarly, the Quad Senior Officials Consultations in November 2019 discussed development finance as well as quality infrastructure investment based on international standards, suggesting that the Quad was seeking enlargement into regional developmental issues.
In actualizing U.S. strategy towards the region, the Quad is crucial for Washington for a number of reasons. One, its informal status with leadership-level vision and backing makes it an unprecedented forum among other multilateral groupings. This allows it to be agile and maneuver around bureaucratic hurdles. Second, unlike traditional alliances, the Quad comprises four capable countries that seek cooperation rather than bandwagoning, for the larger security and prosperity of the region. This takes away Trump’s main contention regarding alliances and multilateral groupings, which according to him are too heavily dependent on American resources and manpower, while offering little in return. Here, each country contributes based on its capabilities and expertise. Third, as reflected in the Wilmington Declaration, the Quad has evolved to include a broader vision for the region, one that connects human security to economic and military policy. This reimagined avatar may make the Quad more palatable to other regional countries wary about a purely military bloc.
Beyond Militarization
The Quad could be seriously strengthened on the strategic and military fronts in Quad 2.0, through bolstered humanitarian assistance and disaster relief capabilities, a focus on maritime security, and cooperation on emerging technologies. But a singular focus on the military domain may be counterproductive, because it will make other regional powers wary of cooperating with the Quad and also because other aspects of Trump’s agenda—such as boosting American exports in an effort to rebalance trade flows or protecting the interests of U.S. businesses dependent on the region—would suffer without a broader view of security in the Indo-Pacific.
Trump’s domestic economic interests are interlinked with the security of the overall maritime domain. For example, securing commercial fishing is as much a trade and economic issue as it is one with implications for food safety and environmental protection. From an economic vantage point, the United States needs to protect its economic interests that are frittered away every year through Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. The commercial seafood industry generates nearly USD $183 billion a year in economic impacts and sustains millions of American jobs. IUU fishing, which now accounts for one-third of global fisheries, has cascading economic impacts for any country.
Similarly, maritime trade supports 30 million American jobs and contributes to 26 percent of the total U.S. GDP. However, recent developments in the Indo-Pacific, ranging from terrorist attacks on ships, globally reported incidents of severing of submarine cables, and increased cases of piracy both in the Western and Eastern Indian Ocean region, need to be addressed and have brought the focus back on the security SLOCs, one of the key conditions for uninterrupted trade and the stabilizing of global market prices.
On these counts, the Trump administration would do well to assess or continue some of the Quad initiatives struck under the previous government that align with its interests. For instance, the bolstering of maritime domain awareness (MDA) was one of the pillars of the Quad’s Wilmington Declaration. The Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific, a regional initiative announced alongside the declaration in 2024, sought to empower partner countries in the Indo-Pacific to better enforce their maritime laws through training. The Trump administration would do well to build on these efforts and maintain a focus on regional MDA so that countries can burden share more by securing the trade and supply chains in the region without being overly dependent on direct American power.
A New Opportunity: Markets and Ports
Sticking with this broader view of security, the Quad can provide new opportunities to secure American interests. The Indo-Pacific region drives two-thirds of the global economy and continues to outperform global trade averages, highlighting the tremendous economic potential in the region. In order to take advantage of this market, the Trump administration will need to ensure its presence in the region through investments in critical outcomes that do not have a purely military objective, such as quality infrastructure development.
While strengthening on the security front may be welcome, as Quad members feel increasingly pressured to take sides, the Indo-Pacific region could become more polarized.
The Quad’s Ports of the Future partnership, announced in 2024, was intended as a way of ensuring that ports in the region adhere to sustainable and resilient standards of operations with the aim of supporting steady, disaster-proof, and transparent trade. The Trump administration needs to support its operationalization, particularly in light of the overlap with broader U.S. goals in the region. Most Indo-Pacific countries seek to develop ports and related transportation and infrastructure to increase trade and connectivity. While China has been making inroads in various nations through port development, its opaque business practices and dual-use infrastructure concern many. Regional countries have repeatedly expressed their desire to foster greater economic integration, promote fair competition, and facilitate robust trade and connectivity within the region—aims that align with U.S. objectives. Therefore, investing in logistics continues to remain an opportune space for the new U.S. administration to continue its regional engagement.
Conclusion
The Trump administration’s initial moves on the Indo-Pacific indicate some continuity with the Biden administration, but also the likelihood of a much more militarized approach towards the Quad. While strengthening on the security front may be welcome, as Quad members feel increasingly pressured to take sides, the Indo-Pacific region could become more polarized. In this regard, the Trump administration would better serve its own aims and interests by not ignoring other elements of its predecessor’s Indo-Pacific strategy, such as quality port infrastructure development, courting private sector investments in strategic technologies, and focusing on securing trade from non-traditional threats.
Also Read: The Quad Is Quietly Adapting Methods of Security Cooperation
***
Image 1: Dr. S. Jaishankar via X
Image 2: Gary Bembridge via Wikimedia Commons
