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Quad Leaders Summit likely to be held in November
Some Quad members believed September wouldn’t be ideal for holding the summit because the focus would be on the UN General Assembly in New York.
The Quad Leaders Summit is expected to be held in November, with the four members of the grouping now focused on giving shape to an agenda to bolster economic security and maritime security, people familiar with the matter said.
The Quad Leaders Summit, which will be hosted by India this year, was earlier expected to be held in September but scheduling and logistical issues have resulted in plans to hold the meet later in the year, the people familiar with planning for the meeting said on condition of anonymity. However, dates are yet to be finalised for the summit, they said.
Some Quad members believed September wouldn’t be ideal for holding the summit because the focus would be on the UN General Assembly in New York, and the people pointed out that Japan is set to hold elections for the upper chamber of the Diet or the Parliament in July, leaving little time for preparations for a summit.
The summit will be preceded by a meeting of the foreign ministers of India, Australia, Japan and the US - the four members of Quad - that is set to be hosted by Washington either in late June or early July, the people said. As preparations have progressed for the summit, the four members of Quad have felt the need to make the agenda more focused so that the grouping can come up with concrete deliverables, the people said.
“There was a feeling that the Quad had spread itself too thin by taking on too many things. There is a need for a more focused agenda,” one of the people said.
The focus in shaping the agenda for the Quad Leaders Summit will be on infrastructure and technology, which both dovetail into creating economic security, maritime security and maritime domain awareness, and disaster response, a second person said.
The people also said some aspects of shaping the agenda were influenced by the imperatives of the Donald Trump administration in the US. “The cancer moonshot, which was conceived at the behest of the Biden administration, doesn’t appear to be a priority at the moment,” the second person said.
The Quad Cancer Moonshot, a global offshoot of a US initiative, focused on reducing the burden of cancer in the Indo-Pacific region, starting with cervical cancer.
“The Quad partners are giving shape to efforts to offer technology and funding for infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific so that smaller countries in the region have more options,” a third person said.
The four members of Quad have already done considerable work to bolster the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), which was launched in 2022 to combat illegal fishing and counter “dark shipping”.
Last year, the Quad agreed to expand this initiative to the Indian Ocean through the Indian Navy’s Information Fusion Centre in Gurugram. The initiative aims to improve real-time maritime monitoring, particularly the identifying and tracking of suspicious or unlawful activities such as “dark shipping”, whereby ships switch off their tracking systems.
In addition to the maritime domain awareness initiative, the Quad recently launched the Indo-Pacific Logistics Network (IPLN), which enables the grouping to leverage shared logistics capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to support the response to natural disasters. The people said IPMDA and IPLN reflect the Quad’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific and highlight practical cooperation to address regional challenges.
Counter-terrorism too is expected to figure in both the upcoming meeting of Quad foreign ministers and the summit, and India will expect support from the other members of the grouping for its new approach to counter cross-border terrorism backed by Pakistan, the people said.
