The QUAD question: Why some minilaterals last and others fade

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will land in India on Saturday amid growing attention on India-US ties, which have shown visible friction since Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office. But beyond bilateral optics lies a bigger question: what happens to the QUAD, a minilateral grouping of India, the United States, Japan and Australia, often seen as a potential countermeasure to China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific, especially at a moment when questions around its momentum are quietly resurfacing? The QUAD story so far: Rise, pause, return. What now? Read Full Story Minilaterals are smaller, issue-specific coalitions of countries built for pragmatic problem solving. As larger multilateral institutions, such as the G20, G7 or BRICS, often struggled to address regional governance challenges swiftly or build consensus, these smaller coalitions became an increasingly important feature of international politics. QUAD, founded in 2007, revived in 2017, and elevated to the leaders’ level in 2021, the QUAD steadily expanded from security consultations into vaccines, critical technologies, maritime coordination, and supply chain resilience, all under the banner of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. Yet the expected QUAD Leaders’ Summit last year never materialised, quietly fuelling questions over political bandwidth, competing priorities, and whether the grouping is beginning to lose momentum. However, these questions are hardly unique to the QUAD. Alliances are often easy to announce, but hard to sustain, and history shows what rhetoric often hides. To understand what separates enduring minilaterals from those that faded, India Today’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) team traces six historical examples: the Five Power Defence Arrangements, Camp David Accords, ANZUS, Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, Central Treaty Organisation, and the United Arab Republic. Minilaterals that lasted, and those that did not So what does this mean for the QUAD? History offers no easy prediction, but it does offer clues. The minilaterals that endured: FPDA, ANZUS, Camp David - remained narrowly focused, operationally active and politically flexible. The ones that faded: SEATO, CENTO, the UAR - struggled with vague commitments, uneven ownership or competing priorities. The QUAD sits somewhere in between: more institutionalised than its critics suggest, yet still far from a treaty alliance. With foreign ministers meeting again this month, on May 26, the question may not be whether the QUAD survives, but whether it evolves fast enough to remain strategically relevant. A timeline of survival: The minilaterals that lasted, and those that did not (Source: Official records) FIVE POWER DEFENCE AGREEMENTS (FPDA) When Britain announced its “East of Suez” military withdrawal in the late 1960s, ending more than a century of colonial and military presence across the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore faced an urgent question: who fills the security vacuum? As scholars Allan Chong Guan and Ralf Emmers note in their work on FPDA, the threat was far from theoretical. Malaysia had only recently emerged from the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, or Konfrontasi (1963 to 1966), marked by cross-border infiltrations and sabotage against the newly formed federation, while communist insurgencies and wider regional instability continued to shape Southeast Asia’s security landscape. In response, the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) was replaced by the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) on 1 November 1971, bringing together Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand under a consultative defence framework rather than a treaty-bound military alliance. The wording mattered. The 1971 Joint Communiqu stated that in the event of an “externally organised or supported” armed attack, or even its threat, members would “immediately consult together” on measures to take, stopping short of a NATO-style automatic response. More than five decades later, FPDA still functions, and that survival itself is evidence. FPDA’s success lies less in wars fought and more in crises avoided. Deterrence is often measured by what did not happen, and in that sense, the arrangement quietly delivered. As documented in FPDA studies and Malaysia’s 50-year security review, the arrangement institutionalised regular military exercises, intelligence exchanges and operational coordination, evolving from Cold War air defence into maritime security, counterterrorism and humanitarian assistance. That endurance is why security scholar Carlyle A Thayer described FPDA as the “quiet achiever” of regional security, a low-profile pact sustained by deterrence, continuity and trust rather than warfighting. CAMP DAVID ACCORDS The Camp David Accords succeeded not because they solved the Middle East conflict, but because they achieved something narrower and far more durable: continuity. Signed in 1978 after 13 days of negotiations hosted by US Presi