The U.S., Japan, India and Australia will hold their Quad summit in Wilmington, Delaware, the home city of U.S. President Joe Biden, on Sept. 21, sources told Nikkei Asia, instead of India, the rotational chair of this year’s gathering.
This will be the last gathering of the current leaders, with Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stepping down soon. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be in the U.S. for the United Nations General Assembly.
But instead of holding a meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. in New York, the Quad gathering will be held at a separate site. In its 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy, the Biden administration described the Quad as a “premier regional grouping” that would play a leading role in COVID-19 response, advance work on critical and emerging technologies, and drive supply chain cooperation.
The exact venue is to be determined, sources said, but it will be in Wilmington, where Biden owns a home and from where he commuted to Washington on Amtrak as a senator.
India, this year’s original host of the Quad, planned to hold a summit in January to coincide with its Republic Day. But the White House declined the offer over scheduling conflicts with the president’s State of the Union address to Congress. Elections in both India and the U.S. posed scheduling challenges in the months that followed.
After Biden announced that he was not running for reelection, New Delhi suggested holding the summit in the U.S. instead, sources said. In mid-August, a senior White House official told Nikkei Asia that the Biden team preferred to hold a stand-alone Quad summit outside New York that would allow the leaders to engage in the “full agenda” of the Quad partnership, without naming where.
The Delaware summit will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Quad.
The Quad began in 2004 as an ad hoc grouping to coordinate disaster response for the Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2007, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed institutionalizing the gathering as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. But with some members nervous about antagonizing China, the dialogue did not take off.
About a decade later, the Quad was revived under former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017. But it was Biden that hosted the first leader-level summits — virtually in March 2021 and in person at the White House in September that year.
According to multiple sources, the U.S. initially explored hosting the Quad summit at the Sunnylands estate in California in early October. But Kishida’s decision to step down ahead of the Sept. 27 leadership race for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party disrupted those plans.
A Sunnylands summit would have been symbolic. It was there that then-U.S. President Barack Obama hosted China’s newly installed President Xi Jinping in June 2013. Xi proposed to build “a new model of major-country relations,” under which the U.S. and China would agree to no conflict or confrontation, treat each other with mutual respect, and seek win-win cooperation.
“The vast Pacific Ocean has enough space for the two large countries of China and the United States,” Xi told Obama.
Many analysts interpreted Xi’s proposal to mean a de facto “G2,” under which the U.S. and China, as equal partners, would consult and decide on global issues. Japan lobbied hard to not accept the concept, sources say.
While Obama ultimately did not accept Xi’s “new model,” his administration’s China policy was one of engagement. Through multiple rounds of cabinet-level U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogues, the U.S. hoped that China would see eye to eye on global issues.
A Quad summit at that same venue would have showed just how much the U.S. view on China has shifted. Through the strengthening of alliances and partnerships, the U.S. is now trying to shape the international environment around China to limit its aggressive actions.
Justin Bassi, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and former national security adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, recently told a webinar hosted by the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum that whenever the four leaders are together, the Quad should meet.
Where the four leaders, “or the four foreign ministers, or, for that matter, four defense ministers are together in the same city at the same time, I’m with the view that there should always be a Quad meeting,” he said.
But the Delaware Quad summit comes amid an intense U.S. presidential election campaign. Despite touting the value of alliances, Biden is reportedly preparing to block the Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds.
