U.S. President Joe Biden will attend a summit with his Quad partners after the election this year, a senior national security adviser told Nikkei Asia, reviving delayed talks that had led to questions over the four-way grouping’s importance.
“The preparatory work for both the foreign ministers meeting and the leaders summit is well underway,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, senior director for East Asia and Oceania at the White House’s National Security Council, said Monday in an exclusive interview.
This year’s Quad chair, India, has so far been unable to gather leaders of the U.S., Japan, India and Australia because of the elections in both India and the U.S. amid regional conflicts across the world. Foreign ministers of the four countries are expected to meet this summer in Japan.
“And we are very confident that we will have really substantial deliverables that continue to build upon the Quad’s mission of delivering public goods for the Indo-Pacific,” Hooper said.
Last week, in a renewed effort, the Quad closely coordinated in delivering assistance for the Papua New Guinea landslide of May 24 that killed more than 2,000 people.
Officials of the four countries on the ground are in close touch with one another “on a near-constant basis,” exchanging information and aligning support for Port Moresby, she said.
But delivering aid to the disaster-stricken Enga region has been a challenge, with tribal conflicts spilling over into blockage of aid.
“Part of what the United States will be doing through our efforts is coordinating the last-mile logistics for the relief supplies provided to PNG by the Quad partners,” Rapp-Hooper said. “All of this aid will be wrapped together and then we on the ground will ensure that helps make it to its ultimate destination.” she said.
In September 2022, the four Quad foreign ministers signed the guidelines for a “Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief in the Indo-Pacific.”
“Behind the scenes, over the course of the last three years, the Quad has been working to improve its capability to respond to humanitarian and disaster scenarios so that … we would be better equipped to work together to coordinate our assistance,” Rapp-Hooper said. “We’ve actually seen those guidelines in practice, really for the first time,” she said.
The Quad has traditionally stayed away from discussing security issues and instead focused on such areas as vaccine distribution and disaster relief. Meanwhile, as tensions mounted in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, the White House has shifted focus to other groupings. like the “Squad” of the U.S., Japan, Australia and the Philippines, or the U.S.-Japan-South Korea trio, trying to formulate a unified approach against China.
Rapp-Hooper noted that the Quad began in 2004 to coordinate aid to areas hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami. She said disaster relief is important to the Quad not only for its history, “but the way the Quad wants to function now. We’ve tried to build the brand of the Quad as a grouping that can provide public goods for the region in a way that demonstrates high quality, high standards.”
“Honing our ability to respond to emergencies like this one is a really important part of the task,” she said.
Yet analysts have said that the Quad has not lived up to its original hype. Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has said there has been “an appearance of slippage” due to scheduling constraints that disrupted several summit plans. A White House spokesperson pushed back on this claim, saying that working groups have met on a regular basis.
In the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy of February 2022, the grouping, labeled as a “premier regional grouping,” was mentioned 13 times.
But in May 2023, a 47-minute Quad summit was squeezed into the itinerary of the Hiroshima Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima after the originally scheduled meeting, which was supposed to be held in Australia, was called off because Biden had to return to the states over domestic congressional concerns.
A survey by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney found that the 22 visits made by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Indo-Pacific countries in the first 18 months of the administration were dwarfed by their 70-plus visits to Europe.
Support for the Quad is bipartisan. Lisa Curtis, a former NSC senior director for South and Central Asia in the Trump administration, said she had no doubt that former President Donald Trump would be “extremely supportive of the Quad” if he were to return to the White House. Curtis said it will be a “key pillar” to achieving the administration’s goals in the Indo-Pacific.
