Quad discussion may take place in Hiroshima after Sydney cancellation

Australian PM Anthony Albanese went on record stating that the Quad leaders will now be having discussion in Japan after cancellation of the Sydney summit

Updated on: May 17, 2023, 11:39:37 IST

By Shishir Gupta

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Albeit US President Joe Biden has cancelled his bilateral trip to Papua New Guinea and Sydney for Quad meeting due to debt ceiling crisis, the discussion expansion and consolidation of the security grouping is expected to take place between leaders of US, India, Japan, and Australia on the side-lines of this May 19-21 G-7 summit in Hiroshima.

Mini Quad is expected in Hiroshima after US President Joe Biden cancelled his Papua New Guinea and Sydney leg of the visit

While New Delhi is tight-lipped about the Quad meeting, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went on record stating that the Quad leaders will now be having the discussion in Japan after cancellation of the Sydney summit on May 24. Albanese also said that PM Narendra Modi is likely to be in Sydney next week for the bilateral program indicating that the Indian leader will also go ahead with his Papua New Guinea visit on May 22 after attending the G-7 summit in Japan.

Although the debt ceiling crisis at home has forced President Biden to cancel the PNG and Sydney leg of the visit, the Quad leaders will be talking Indo-Pacific in Hiroshima so that the quadrilateral grouping takes the next steps to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Quad needs to send a message to ally Philippines, which has placed five navigational buoys within its exclusive economic zone to assert sovereignty over the disputed Spratly Islands in South China Sea. The Ferdinand Marcos Junior government took this step-in pursuance of closer ties with US and set up five navigational buoys from May 10-12 in five areas within a 322-kilometer radius, including the Whitsun Reef, where the Chinese Navy has displayed its muscle in 2021.

In this context, no Quad discussion will send negative signals in the Indo-Pacific and particularly in Papua New Guinea, where the US was planning to initiate a security agreement to rival Chinese maritime security agreement with next door Solomon Islands in the Far Pacific. No dialogue will also have an impact on Taiwan, which is facing the brunt of Chinese military muscle over the past years with PLA aggression mounting by the day.

With the Chief of Defence Staff, principal military advisors of Quad countries, meeting in California on May 16 and charting out a security response to Chinese belligerence in the Indo-Pacific, the Quad leaders may find time in Hiroshima to come out with a statement laying the path ahead on maritime security and resilient global supply chains.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

Get the latest World News, breaking headlines and global updates from the US, UK, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia and other countries. Follow major international events on Hindustan Times.