Quietly, but surely, life is ebbing away from the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad).

A repost from 5 November 2025

From its post-2004 tsunami beginnings, the Quad has existed largely in a state of policy indetermination, documented only by dull communiqués and faux-fun photographs of the politicians who issued them. Such longevity as it had was sustained by desultory meetings of defence and foreign ministers, and an occasional heads of government meeting, usually in the shadows of some other more important event. Most Quad meetings were hastily convened and opportunistic, driven not by disaster recovery, which at least had humanitarian relevance, but by the strategic objective of “containing” China.

From the outset, the Quad’s barrackers were totally unable to understand that China is not for containing, to channel Margaret Thatcher. More significantly, its barrackers — many of them self-appointed doyens in the self-defining world of “international relations” — were innocent of any deep understanding of history or its cultural imperatives.

Enduring institutions are not defined by shared threat perceptions. Rather, they represent and realise the powerful combination of enduring interests and enduring cultural, institutional, political and structural alignments. Unlike NATO and ANZUS, built around collective defence, CENTO (the Central Treaty Organisation) and SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation) were ill-considered and poorly-engineered attempts at containment of global communism and its backers, the Soviet Union and China. Their ill-assorted members fitted badly in unfit-for-purpose associations.

The transience of the........

© Pearls and Irritations