A stretch of awkward diplomacy is unfolding in the Indo-Pacific.
After India’s 2025 term as the Quad’s rotating chair ended without a summit, New Delhi is planning to host a foreign ministers’ meeting that could be framed as a leaders-level discussion, even if the top leaders do not attend, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The move is seen as a way to smooth India’s ruffled feathers on several counts.
“It’s akin to putting lipstick on a pig,” said Sourabh Gupta of the Institute for China-America Studies, a think tank in Washington.
“The outcomes in practice will not be worth the paper on which they are written,” he added, calling it “more farce than tragedy”.
The Quad, an informal strategic grouping that also includes Australia, Japan and the United States, was revived in 2017 during the first term of US President Donald Trump and has often been viewed as a counterweight to China’s growing influence in the region.
But amid tensions with Delhi over a long-delayed potential trade deal, Trump has largely sidelined the grouping and declined to attend a proposed summit in India last year.
In addition, sources say it is unlikely that Trump will stop in India around his trip to China to meet President Xi Jinping on May 14-15.
Instead, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will attend the Quad meeting in Delhi on his behalf next month. It is Australia’s turn to host the summit, but Canberra has deferred to Delhi. This will be the first Quad engagement in India since 2023.
US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had demanded that the Trump administration convene a Quad summit before Trump’s meeting with Xi.
Experts say the optics are delicate. For India, hosting a leaders’ meeting without full participation would signal continuity in its Indo-Pacific role. But it also highlights the limits of its ability to anchor top-tier Quad diplomacy at a time of shifting US priorities.
Gupta said that in diplomatic terms, this pretence of a leaders’ meeting was not a good look for the Quad, noting that the grouping was not doing anything “terribly majestic or magnificent”.
He contended that after the “disrespect” shown by Trump towards Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over Russian oil purchases, tensions with Pakistan, and disinterest in India’s chairmanship of the Quad, India should have suspended the bloc’s leader-level framework and reverted back to its ministerial-led format.
Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Programme at the Quincy Institute, said Rubio’s visit signalled that Quad summits might be undergoing a “de-leaderisation process”.
“This would be a blunt message from Washington on the perceived secondary role of the Quad in meeting the China challenge,” he said, noting that Delhi did not have the same level of “allure” in Washington as it used to.
Lisa Curtis, who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for South and Central Asia during Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, argued that trying to label a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting as a leader-level meeting would “only draw attention to the fact that the leaders are, in fact, not present”.
“Playing such a game would only make the Quad look less credible in the eyes of other countries in the region,” said Curtis, who is now director of the Indo-Pacific Security Programme at the Centre for a New American Security.
The awkwardness is amplified by broader geopolitical recalibrations in Washington under Trump, who has signalled a more transactional approach to alliances and a warmer tone towards China and India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
After lauding Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, the de facto head of state, for his “great job” at mediating US-Iran peace talks to try to end the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, Trump on Wednesday voiced anew his close ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Talking about the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump ruled out that China was giving any weapons to Iran and said: “President Xi will give me a big, fat hug when I get there in a few weeks.”
With India uneasy with Pakistan’s return to the international spotlight, Indian media reported that Delhi is also planning a Brics foreign ministers’ meeting in mid-May.
Alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the expanded Brics grouping also includes Iran and the United Arab Emirates – a Gulf state increasingly entangled in the hostilities involving the US, Israel and Iran.
Brics has not issued any statement on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.
Trump has been vocal about his distrust of Brics since he returned to the Oval Office and has threatened 100 per cent tariffs against the bloc if they try to sidestep the US dollar in trade. However, Brics members have been hit hard by the US-Israel war against Iran as the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global energy shipping, has squeezed supply and skyrocketed oil prices.
Amid the crisis, the US has offered its own oil exports, even as it has pressured India to reduce its imports of Iranian and Russian energy.
A trade delegation from New Delhi is visiting Washington next week to resume talks on a bilateral trade agreement involving a framework announced in February.
During a speech in Washington on Wednesday, Indian chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran claimed the China plus one model – making supply chains less dependent on Beijing – was “back on track”, with Delhi seeking trade agreements around the world, including with the US.
India’s democracy as a counterweight to China was a key selling point for India in Washington before Trump’s second term. However, the “America first” president has not seen India in that light and sent his good friend Sergio Gor as his envoy to Delhi only in January – a full year after taking the presidency.
Gor, who played a key role in breakthrough trade talks on Trump’s tariffs on India linked to Russian oil imports, visited Washington last week and had dinner with the president.
This was followed by a visit by Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, who earlier served as India’s ambassador to China. Misri met Gor and Rubio together in Washington, with Gor announcing on social media that Rubio would visit India in May, without elaborating.
Rubio’s role adds another layer of complexity. A vocal China critic during his Senate years – and sanctioned by Beijing – he now finds himself tasked with executing diplomacy in a period of cautious US-China engagement, while also maintaining momentum in Indo-Pacific coordination.
For now, the Quad continues to function through ministerial channels and working-level coordination. But the gap between ambition and attendance has become increasingly visible.
Experts say that formulation captures both the political sensitivity and the delicate balancing act now under way.
Without a US-India trade agreement, which is unlikely, Rubio’s trip would pale in comparison to Trump’s summit in Beijing, said Gupta of ICAS.
“With Pakistan and Munir deep in the weeds on Iran war-related peace brokership, the India stopover will look like a cheap consolation prize too,” he added. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
