By Mayank Chhaya-
The Quad summit this weekend in President Joe Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, will be his swan song in the four-way diplomatic engagement between the U.S., India, Australia and Japan.
It will also likely be the last Quad summit for Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Both Biden and Kishida will soon leave office.
For India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the summit is continuation of their respective foreign policy within the quadrilateral arrangement predominantly aimed at counterbalancing China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific.
For Biden the summit is perhaps the last major foreign policy engagement of its kind in his decades-long career. He is expected to treat it as a platform to shine up his international legacy. Within the Quad, the summit will afford him an opportunity to shape it in a way that lasts beyond his presidency.
With the White House now a tossup between his Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the Quad could well be entering a new era. Even though Harris is expected to broadly continue Biden’s approach to the Indo-Pacific, she will also bring her own ideas to the Quad. Trump, on the other hand, is not particularly known to be engaged in such multilateral groupings. He may treat the other three, Japan, India and Australia as individual partnerships rather than a consolidated approach towards China.
Biden stood out for making the Quad a leader-level grouping with an eye on China’s muscling around in the South China Sea.
National security communications adviser John Kirby said the four leaders will discuss the “challenges that still exist in the region caused by aggressive PRC military action, for instance; unfair trade practices; tensions over the Taiwan Strait.”
Maritime security and Coast Guard cooperation are part of subjects featuring high on the summit’s priorities.
A significant aspect of the summit will be Biden’s personal favorite preoccupation with battling cancer worldwide. In particular, there will likely be a specific headway to deal with cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific as part of Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative. It was a result of Biden’s son Beau’s death due to brain cancer when he the former was vice president.
The summit was originally to be hosted by India, but New Delhi deferred to the choice of Wilmington considering that Biden has very limited term left as president.
This will be the fourth gathering where all four leaders have attended.
For Modi, the Quad summit is the first major international engagement after he was re-elected to power in the last parliamentary election in June.
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