If all goes according to plan, officials from the United States, Australia, Japan and India will sit down together on the margins of next week's East Asia Summit. The gathering will mark a resurrection of "The Quad", the four-way dialogue that kicked off in 2007, and which died the following year after Canberra's withdrawal. Re-establishing a forum in which the four like-minded democracies can discuss and coordinate their regional aims is a modest but meaningful step in the right direction. Done right, the meeting should generate not only a few headlines, but also spur concrete four-party cooperation.

Today, the Indo-Pacific region is witnessing a shift in the balance of power and a changing mix of competition and cooperation. China's rising assertiveness is the most distinctive element, with its military modernisation, One Belt One Road infrastructure efforts, tendency toward illiberalism and penchant for coercion together focusing minds across the region. To this should be added North Korea's missile and nuclear provocations, the ever-present challenge of terrorism, a proliferation of cyber attacks and the need to respond to large-scale natural disasters. The demand for attention and resources – particularly but not exclusively in the security sphere – is rising faster than the US and its allies can provide them.

An answer to this dilemma is managed security networking: building out connections among allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific that share the aim of ensuring a rules-based regional order. Working together, like-minded countries can do more to bolster rules and maintain a balance of power than any might do alone. Indeed, pursuing new regional relationships, especially in defence, has become a recent hallmark of both US and Australian foreign policy, with Japan and India taking a similar approach.

A stable, peaceful Indo-Pacific is critical to Australian and American security and economic interests. Pablo Martinez Monsivais

This is why reviving the Quad is so strategically sound. In addition to cooperating on issues like defence exercises and infrastructure, closer cooperation among the four helps ensure that China rises in a region where the democratic powers are strong and working together. It creates a forum for coordination and common messages, and allows officials from each country to exchange information. And it represents a new pillar of America's regional engagement, which has come under serious question in Australia and beyond.

Critics of the concept observe that China will be displeased that representatives from the US and Australia are meeting with India and Japan, and that the arrangement suggests an ambition to contain China in its home region. Yet an Asian NATO the Quad is not, nor is it likely ever to be. It will remain a valuable mechanism for pursuing common aims, not a mutual-defence pact aimed at deterring and defeating the People's Liberation Army. Indeed, the Quad merely adds a country to the already-existing trilateral dialogues that the US has with Australia and Japan, and which it has with Japan and India. And since Beijing's actions matter more than its officials' private irritations, it's worth observing that suspending the Quad in 2008 seems to have elicited no reduction in Chinese assertiveness.