There won’t be a Quad summit in the foreseeable future, not in 2024 at least. The summit will take place after the US Presidential election in November this year, so effectively in 2025, only after a new US President assumes office in January that year. This was disclosed by the US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti this week, giving rise to questions about what exactly the United States is up to when it comes to its Indo-Pacific policy, at the centre of which is the Quad.
The Quad summit of 2024, which India is supposed to host, got postponed because of the Australian and Japanese leaders’ scheduling problems in January. With India going into election mode, the latest that it can hold the summit is around June, after a new government is sworn in towards the end of May. Surely, President Biden could have participated in a two-day summit around the middle of the year, five months ahead of the November election, provided he is still the Democratic Presidential candidate.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had attended the 2022 Quad summit in Tokyo barely a day after he was sworn in, for he understood the Quad’s importance. To repeat the old cliché, where there is a will there is a way. It looks like Mr Biden has neither, especially when seen in the backdrop of his domestic “compulsions” that have been cropping up when it comes to the Quad summit. This is not the first time that President Biden has made it clear that the Quad is not a priority for him. In 2023 too, when Australia was scheduled to host the Quad summit, the US President expressed his inability to attend it a week ahead of the summit because of domestic reasons. So effectively, if the summit is held in 2025, it will be nearly after three years of the Tokyo summit in 2022. What sort of a message does this give to the world, particularly to China?
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, more commonly known as Quad, had faced an untimely death in 2008, inside a year of its establishment in 2007, after Australia pulled out of it. It was in 2017 that the then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with US President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Michael Turnbull revived it.
Quad received the required impetus from President Biden as well, when an in-person leaders’ meeting was held at the White House in Washington, DC in September 2021. The “formalization” of the Quad was seen as part of the US’ pivot to Asia, which started under President Barack Obama. But ever since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Mr Biden seems to have pivoted back to Europe/Atlantic and downgraded Asia/Indo-Pacific, to the extent that he has taken his eyes off China, and is in fact busy appeasing China. This has to be seen in the context of what Mr Biden promised CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping in the last two bilateral meetings that they had, first on the sidelines of the G20 Bali summit in November 2022 and then on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in San Francisco in November 2023. After both meetings, the White House readouts spoke of Mr Biden making it clear that the US would continue to align efforts with allies and partners around the world, while the Chinese interpreted the meetings very differently.
At Bali, the Chinese side claimed that Mr Biden had said, “The United States does not seek a new Cold War, does not seek to revitalize alliances against China”—a claim that went uncontested by the White House. While after the San Francisco meeting, Wang Yi made China’s displeasure clear with the US efforts at “encircling and containing China under the pretext of competition”. Given that the Quad is seen by the Chinese as an instrument to encircle them, is this quadrilateral platform paying the price of Mr Biden’s push for “responsibly managing competitive aspects of the (US-China) relationship”, as it was mentioned in the San Francisco readout? In other words, how serious is Joe Biden about the threat from China? While better ties with China are desirable for both India and the US, but can appearing conciliatory change the nature of the beast? China under the Communists is a malevolent power, clearly focused towards world domination, for which it wants to dethrone the US from its number one position.
China has zero interest in resolving the Ukraine war, for the war has shifted US focus from China and has made Russia increasingly dependent on it—both of which suit Beijing. Biden cannot hope to defeat Russia and then think of the Chinese problem, and let it be business as usual in the meanwhile. China is going about its business just the way it has been—by crippling the West from inside, while extending its sphere of influence on the weak and vulnerable, but strategically important countries. As an authoritarian China tries to remodel the world with Chinese Communist characteristics, can the Quad be allowed to gather dust? Next time anyone accuses India of putting the Quad to disuse by not letting it become a military alliance, the question that needs to be asked is: is it really India, or is it actually the US, which does not seem interested to take on China? The optics are bad. It’s hoped that the US will change course and give the Quad its due importance.
Joyeeta Basu