Image Source: Getty
“Short and sweet” is how analysts described the joint statement released by the Quad foreign ministers on the sidelines of President Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President of the United States in January 2025. The convivial atmosphere of the summit—the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first in his new cabinet role—underscores the Quad’s enduring unity and strategic weight within the altered, increasingly competitive security order that President Trump now faces in his second non-consecutive term in office. It is in this context that attention must be paid to the scale and quality of security cooperation among its member-states. The question of intelligence sharing lies at the heart of such issues, especially in a more competitive geopolitical landscape both within the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
The question of intelligence sharing lies at the heart of such issues, especially in a more competitive geopolitical landscape both within the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
New convergences: Counter-piracy and undersea domain awareness
Recent years have brought into focus new security challenges within the Indo-Pacific and the wider maritime sphere. Piracy, conducted by both state-backed and non-state actors, is resurgent on the western fringes of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), jeopardising global trade flows and thus the world economy—not least the economic powerhouses of the Quad. Elsewhere, China’s suspected role in the damage done to submarine cables off Swedish and, more recently, Taiwanese waters points towards the former’s expanding offensive capabilities in the undersea domain. Both these challenges require Quad intelligence services to develop joint strategies and best practices to tackle them.
The Quad nations have proven adept in tackling the unique intelligence challenges posed within the maritime sphere, particularly on the oceanic surface. Indeed, mechanisms such as the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), launched in 2022, have provided a fillip to Quad efforts to jointly tackle such security challenges as ‘dark shipping’, where maritime vessels, often connected to organised crime syndicates and illicit state/non-state actors, seek to achieve stealth in their operations by avoiding traditional surveillance architectures. Yet while the predominant focus has been on the maritime surface, the submarine domain—increasingly a site for growing geopolitical competition, given the vast network of critical national infrastructure proliferating across its space—merits greater convergence among Quad member-states in the form of increased intelligence sharing and the joint development of undersea ISR technologies such as sensors and weapons systems. It is equally vital that the IPMDA be updated at the next Quad Leaders’ Summit, slated for September 2025 in New Delhi, to incorporate undersea domain awareness (UDA) as a core function of MDA and establish capabilities and liaison frameworks to this end.
The Quad nations have proven adept in tackling the unique intelligence challenges posed within the maritime sphere, particularly on the oceanic surface.
At a national level, India’s Information Fusion Centre- Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) can play a critical role in enabling some of these convergences among Quad member-states as we head into the mid-2020s, centring New Delhi as an agenda-setter among its Quad partners. Although understated, the IFC-IOR’s achievements over the past year have been notable, its dissemination of real-time intelligence helping MARCOS special forces achieve several key counter-piracy successes in early 2024. Hosting several international liaison officers, including naval representatives of the United States (US), Australia, and Japan, the IFC-IOR is well positioned to play a larger role within India’s intelligence strategy within the Quad—and through this, enabling the Quad in pursuing its grand strategic objectives.
Trump 2.0: Chequered positivity
President Trump’s re-entry into the Oval office has been met with varying reception globally. While Western Europe remains wary of the US President’s recent territorial demands and support for political movements within their own countries, opinions across the Indo-Pacific have been less rigid, with many welcoming his transactionalism and strategic outlook as potentially favourable to their own foreign policy outlooks. A similar line of argumentation may be applied to the US’s new outlook towards the Quad and the new role of the US relating to questions on intelligence cooperation.
At the outset, the prospects for intra-Quad intelligence cooperation seem positive under a Trump presidency—particularly as the US remains, arguably, the most powerful member of the bloc. Having adopted a generally hawkish position against Beijing, represented in the views of Marco Rubio, NSA Michael Waltz, and other key members of the new national security establishment in the US, and more recently materialising through the imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports into the US, it make be reasonably speculated that the Trump administration will continue this line of policy into its dealings within the Quad, including seeking greater investment in strategic capabilities such as intelligence. Indeed, the US under the first Trump administration played a key role in providing tacit intelligence support to India during the Galwan crisis in the summer of 2020. Sections of Project 2025, speculated to serve as the Trump administration’s policy blueprint for its second term, also call for an increase in intelligence sharing with India via Quad channels.
The US under the first Trump administration played a key role in providing tacit intelligence support to India during the Galwan crisis in the summer of 2020.
Yet, challenges remain. Close aides of the US President now include a variety of powerful entrepreneurs and industrialists in the tech space, often with key business interests in China. Indeed, such developments have raised concerns among analysts about a possible tilt towards or ‘deal’ with Beijing by the Trump administration. Counterintelligence concerns thus abound surrounding the integrity and security of intelligence shared. While India emerges relatively unscathed, being close but not a treaty partner to the US and therefore relatively less dependent on the US intelligence agenda than Australia or Japan, the mistrust caused among security officials in both Canberra and Tokyo may metastasise within a minilateral grouping like the Quad, with adverse impacts for wider intelligence sharing and cooperation
Domestic efforts in the US to downsize its intelligence community comes with consequences for the Quad. If the CIA’s new Director John Ratcliffe is to be believed, the CIA’s latest, leaner iteration will allow it to dedicate more resources in a targeted, aggressive manner against China, the “greatest geopolitical threat” to the US- a stance speaking to the concerns and interests of the Quad’s member-states. Yet a smaller and increasingly unpredictable CIA underscores the need for other Quad member states to expand and strengthen their services to diminish overreliance on US intelligence and the diplomatic baggage attached to it. Indeed, the changing face of the US intelligence community under the second Trump administration provides opportunities for Quad member-states to both individually develop strategic muscle by expanding and reforming their national intelligence communities and also cooperate in smaller, often trilateral frameworks to uphold common interests. This may take a form akin to the Safari Club—the pentalateral intelligence sharing network set up in the late 1970s between the security services of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, France, and pre-revolutionary Iran to uphold common interests in Africa and the Middle East at a time when their most powerful intelligence partner, the CIA, had had its wings clipped under the directives of the Church Committee investigating its abuses of power. While a new model of intelligence cooperation between India, Australia, and Japan need not take the same shape exactly, it would enable the other Quad member-states to maintain as cordial a relationship as possible with US intelligence services while maintaining strategic autonomy and avoiding overdependence on Washington in the future.
The changing face of the US intelligence community under the second Trump administration provides opportunities for Quad member-states to both individually develop strategic muscle by expanding and reforming their national intelligence communities and also cooperate in smaller, often trilateral frameworks to uphold common interests.
Simultaneously however, the US’s ongoing competition with China in the emerging tech space, most saliently in the field of AI in recent weeks, may have adverse consequences for mechanisms for cooperation on emerging technologies, as the US unilaterally prioritises national development in this space over the multilateralism facilitated by the Quad’s Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group. This may have a ripple effect on intelligence liaison, preventing partner intelligence services from gaining a fuller understanding of best practices and threat actors within this growing space.
National counterintelligence: A prerequisite for multilateral cooperation
Steps are also being taken by Quad member-states to fortify the capabilities of their national intelligence services—the sine non qua for multilateral intelligence sharing, establishing the prerequisites for trust and incentives for sharing in a space where secrets are often closely guarded, even from allies. Japanese counterintelligence agencies have long been found lacking in this regard, being mandated to only target ‘organisational’ threat actors, for instance (a model that does not often correlate with the reality of state-backed industrial espionage), and more recently, having faced coordinated cyberattacks by Chinese hacker group MirrorForce. Yet in recent times, Japan has undertaken efforts to secure its national secrets, enacting legislation in mid-2024 to establish stronger security checks of those working in key economic divisions within the government—increasingly a target of Chinese espionage.
India’s Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) is set to be expanded in the coming months, ensuring tighter control over external flows of intelligence while facilitating greater interoperability among domestic agencies.
Likewise, India and Australia, too, have undertaken steps to ensure the robustness of their counterintelligence architectures. India’s Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) is set to be expanded in the coming months, ensuring tighter control over external flows of intelligence while facilitating greater interoperability among domestic agencies. Australia, likewise, has begun to emphasise anti-compromise measures to secure critical strategic programmes, particularly those conducted under AUKUS mandates, such as the joint nuclear submarine taskforce, by embedding ASIO officers within these projects.
Perhaps at no time since its inception in 2007 has the need for the Quad and its joint efforts been more critical. The expansion of geopolitical faultlines in Asia, coupled with shifting political tides globally and the emergence of new areas of technical and strategic convergence among India, the US, Japan, and Australia, reiterate the need for joint cooperation in new sectors, in particular that of intelligence. How the grouping will manage joint cooperation in this domain, given the prospects, will ultimately determine its success and effectiveness as we head into the second quarter of the 21st century.
Archishman Ray Goswami is a Non-Resident Junior Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
PREV
