U.S. President Joe Biden hosted fellow Quad leaders – Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia – at his hometown of Wilmington in the state of Delaware, about 176 kilometres away from Washington, D.C. It was the sixth summit-level meeting of the four-nation grouping since March 2021. Elevating Quad’s status to the summit level will remain as a key diplomatic achievement of the outgoing Biden Administration that took office in January 2021, even though the grouping was revived at the senior officials’ level by the previous Trump Administration in November 2017.
The United States has been the leading force behind the convening of Quad summits since 2021. Originally, it was India’s turn to host the summit in 2024, but New Delhi wholeheartedly deferred its turn to Washington, agreeing to host the next year’s summit, considering the leadership transition underway in the U.S. and to further institutionalise the minilateral grouping ahead of President Biden’s departure from the Oval Office. Last year, Prime Minister Kishida hosted the Quad summit at his hometown of Hiroshima. So, Wilmington was indeed a ‘farewell summit’ for both leaders, as they have announced to step down this year with no plans for re-election.
Both Japan and the United States have hosted two in-persons summits each in the last four years, in addition to two virtual summits, while Quad foreign ministers met eight times in the last five years, the most recent being in Tokyo in July. The month of September has been instrumental in the evolution of the four-nation grouping in the Indo-Pacific. Five years ago, September 2019 witnessed the grouping getting raised to the foreign ministers’ level in New York, and two years later, September 2021 marked the first in-person Quad leaders’ summit in Washington. Since then, Quad has expanded and diversified its ambit of cooperation to newer areas.
Enhanced maritime security cooperation
The Wilmington Declaration, issued shortly following the summit read, inter alia, “… the Quad is more strategically aligned than ever before … we are harnessing all of our collective strengths and resources, from governments to the private sector to people-to-people relationships, to support the region’s sustainable development, stability, and prosperity by delivering tangible benefits to the people of the Indo-Pacific …” And in a pointed reference to China, it said, “we seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated – one where all countries are free from coercion, and can exercise their agency to determine their futures …”
Critiques of Quad often point out that the grouping isn’t doing enough to deal with the elephant in the room – maritime security concerns arising from China’s rise. But that has seen a notable change in the last two years. At Wilmington, an overarching set of new initiatives were announced, particularly relating to maritime security and health security. The 2022-initiated Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) was given more teeth this time with the announcement of new regional ‘Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific’ (MAITRI) and a ‘maritime legal dialogue’ to support efforts to uphold the rules-based maritime order in the Indo-Pacific.
Earlier this year, the Quad countries have expressed their intent to expand the IPMDA, linking key regional information fusion centres, into the Indian Ocean region. And at the recently concluded Quad summit, the leaders announced that the Coast Guards of their respective countries plan to launch the first-ever ‘Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission’ in 2025, to improve interoperability and maritime safety, along with a pilot Logistics Network project, to pursue shared airlift capacity among the four nations.
The leaders also announced a new ‘Quad Ports of the Future Partnership’ to harness the grouping’s expertise to support sustainable and resilient port infrastructure development across the region, and a conference in this regard will be held in India next year. The ‘Quad Cancer Moonshot’, aimed to prevent, detect, and reduce the burden of cancer in the region, was another appreciable initiative announced during the summit. Notably, the four Quad navies will come together for Exercise Malabar later this year – the fifth year in a row with all four participating.
Strategic convergence
A key aspect of Quad is the perfect integration of internal and region-wide initiatives of co-operation. Along with collaborative ventures among the members themselves, the four-nation grouping executes ambitious projects that benefit partner countries across various sub-regions of the broader Indo-Pacific, including Southeast Asia, Oceania, and the Indian Ocean. The grouping of maritime democracies has assisted over two dozen countries so far to access maritime data on dark vessels to better monitor the activities in their exclusive economic zones.
Despite all these initiatives, the grouping is still devoid of a hard military dimension, or a treaty or a Secretariat. However, areas such as health security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), maritime domain awareness, physical and digital infrastructure, critical and emerging technologies, climate change, counter-terrorism, scientific research, and cybersecurity have been given a fillip lately. HADR was Quad’s earliest area of cooperation, dating back to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. However, the very idea of a ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’ (QSD) and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ came only three years later, in 2007, thanks to former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe.
Back to the present, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi happens to be the only Quad leader to have met both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thus far. Similarly, the country’s ‘time-tested’ friendship with Russia, its purchase of Russian arms and oil, and its participation in blocs led by China and Russia such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), when the other three Quad members remain part of the Western alliance system, have not affected the grouping’s internal cohesion. Why? Similarly, why did Australia return to Quad in 2017, almost a decade after its exit from the QSD in 2008? Growing strategic convergence between the four maritime democracies explains it all.
Over the course of time, every Quad member has learnt to regard each other’s varying strategic interests and worldviews independently of its own and have learned to engage with each other accordingly, for the greater good of keeping the region free of threats emanating from a singular source. Moreover, the rise of minilaterals such as Quad and AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) call out the indecisiveness of consensus-based ASEAN mechanisms in dealing with regional challenges. Coming back to U.S. leadership, a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Quad Caucus formed just ahead of the Wilmington summit indicates policy continuity, and Quad is well-poised to stand the test of time further ahead, irrespective of leadership transitions.
