The Quad needs ASEAN more than ASEAN needs the Quad

When the foreign ministers of the United States, Japan, India and Australia gathered in Manila last week on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting, they issued a joint press release (Opens in new window) with a familiar refrain: “unwavering support for ASEAN unity and centrality”. Most coverage will read it as intended, the Quad lending its weight to Southeast Asia’s preferred regional architecture.

That reading is backwards. The Manila statement is better understood as an output from a grouping in search of relevance, attaching itself to the one regional institution that still convenes reliably.

The Quad now needs ASEAN more than ASEAN needs the Quad, and the region can see it.

Consider what the Quad has and has not managed since its leaders last met in Wilmington in September 2024. India, as host, was to convene the next leaders’ summit, first slated for November 2025, then pushed into early 2026. Neither window held. The delay is a casualty of the tariff rupture between Washington and New Delhi, which saw President Donald Trump impose 50% tariffs on Indian goods and cancel his planned visit, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to China. The last leaders’ summit is now nearly two years old, with no date, venue or host confirmed.

This is the tell. The one meeting that would demonstrate top-level commitment keeps slipping, while the meetings that demonstrate mere presence keep multiplying, with two foreign ministers’ meetings this year alone – in New Delhi in May, and now Manila in July.

A fair objection is that the Quad’s machinery still runs through its own capitals. The group is not relocating to Southeast Asia. The ministers met in New Delhi in May, and the next ministerial is expected in the United States. But meetings in member capitals are the routine business of a minilateral keeping its wheels turning. What matters is what the Quad does with its scarce moments of public signalling.

In Manila, the sole documentary output was a press release about ASEAN, not a statement on the Quad’s own cooperation, but an affirmation of someone else’s institution. When a grouping’s most visible product between summits is a declaration of another organisation’s centrality, it raises the question of whose legitimacy is being borrowed, and in which direction.

None of this is to say the Quad isn’t meaningful. The Delhi ministerial in May launched a Critical Minerals Initiative Framework (Opens in new window) and an Indo-Pacific energy security initiative (Opens in new window). But these are frameworks and intentions, not the capital that would shift anyone’s economic calculus, which points to the deeper mismatch beneath the scheduling: the gap between the Quad’s economic language and Southeast Asia’s economic reality.

“Economic prosperity and security” is one of the Quad’s four priority areas, restated in Manila. Yet for most of ASEAN the indispensable economic partner remains China. The Lowy Institute’s own Southeast Asia Influence Index (Opens in new window) makes the point plainly: China is the region’s most influential external power, strongest precisely where the Quad is weakest, trade and economic engagement, as the region’s leading export market and a growing source of investment. The Index also judges that US influence is likely to erode further as Trump’s tariffs, aid cuts and migration curbs bite. A grouping whose two largest members are themselves locked in a tariff dispute is not a compelling economic alternative. It is a hedge among hedges.

ASEAN, for its part, loses nothing. Affirmations of centrality cost nothing to receive and flatter an institution whose cohesion is often questioned. Manila hosted the Quad; the Quad did not host Manila. The asymmetry of who travels to whom, and who issues statements about whom, is its own data point.

None of this means the Quad is finished. It means the Quad is running on diplomatic momentum rather than strategic output. And Southeast Asia – the most practised audience in the world at reading great-power signalling – has noticed.

Two things would change the story. The first is a leaders’ summit actually held, with a host and a date, proving the Washington-New Delhi relationship can bear the weight placed on it. The second is an economic offer substantial enough to register against the gravity of China trade –critical minerals processing, digital infrastructure finance, or supply-chain integration – that arrives as investment, not communiqué.

Until then, the honest reading of Manila is not that the Quad is backing ASEAN centrality. It is that ASEAN centrality is propping up the Quad.