Alliance politics across the Indo-Pacific: an offensive realist analysis of the QUAD’s transformation

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) was first initiated by the United States, Japan, Australia, and India in 2007 but did not succeed and was quickly deactivated. Ten years later, the QUAD was revived in 2017 and has been reinvented by the four powers into an informal alliance. Adopting the theoretical lens of offensive realism, this study explains the QUAD’s transformation according to the changing relative power distribution in the Indo-Pacific region. It empirically argues that the increasingly unbalanced multipolarity in the Indo-Pacific region is the structural factor that led to the revival and reinvention of the QUAD since 2017. The future of the QUAD hinges on the future trajectories of the US–China great power competition in the Indo-Pacific region.