4th Quad Leaders’ Summit Pushes Holistic Approach to Foreign Policy

On September 21, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in Wilmington, Delaware, for the fourth Quad Leaders’ Summit. The objective of the Quad is to promote “the free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion, to bolster security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.”

At the time of the summit, one of the Quad leaders, Kishida, was mere days from stepping down; Biden, too, is nearing the end of his presidency. Albanese, meanwhile, may not survive Australia’s election in May next year. Nevertheless, the meeting remains important not due to the personal relationships of the four leaders, but because of the institutionalization of the leaders’ meetings. It is the programs that their respective countries commit to that is the essential feature, and the ability for these programs to persist outside of the changes of leadership that are inherent to democratic systems.

To this end, the leaders committed their countries to enhance inter-parliamentary exchanges, to create a platform of dialogue between elected representatives outside of the leaders’ meetings. This development is built on the understanding that relatively junior elected representatives may eventually become senior figures in their country’s governments, and therefore the building of relationships is essential to the maintenance of the Quad across changes of government, changes of party leadership, and changes of generations. In light of this, members of the U.S Congress have created a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Quad Caucus.

Alongside this, in the coming months a new meeting of Quad commerce and industry ministers will take place. Its agenda will focus on how the four countries can work together to protect and enhance semiconductor supply chains, and advance cooperation on the mining, processing, and manufacturing products requiring critical minerals, as well as emerging technologies at large.

Coupled with this will be greater coordination between the four countries’ development finance agencies, which will explore how to best cooperate on investments into health security, food security, clean energy, and the building of quality infrastructure throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

The commitment to public health in the Indo-Pacific was demonstrated with the creation of a new initiative known as the Quad Cancer Moonshot, which seeks to strengthen overall cancer care in the region by improving health infrastructure, expanding research collaborations, and providing more support for cancer prevention, detection, treatment, and care. Its initial focus will be on cervical cancer, which is preventable through vaccination and treatable if detected early, but remains the third leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the Indo-Pacific.

The overarching objective here is to promote the Quad as a force for good. It understands the larger strategic forms of instability in the region but also sees instability on a personal level and seeks to tackle issues of critical importance to the daily lives of people.

These targeted initiatives and institutional arrangements are critical for gaining buy-in from other countries in the region that may be wary of the competition for power and influence in the region. However, the rise of China as a regional superpower and the challenging of rules and competition for influence is not the only potential destabilizing force that could pose a problem to both the Indo-Pacific and the future of the Quad.

These institutional arrangements could be blown up by a return of Donald Trump to the White House with a more unstable U.S. foreign policy, and a team of loyalists who see the only institution worth advancing as Trump himself. Selling the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific to a man who is hostile to rules is a tall order. Strategic competition with China may align more substantially with his own personality traits, but, then again, Trump remains someone who is impressed by world leaders that do break rules, so there’s no guarantee that his whims will align with the broader mission of the Quad.

This broader mission was acknowledged by Biden in an informal comment he made to the other leaders at the summit, that China was “testing” them across the region. While several media outlets decided to report this as a hot mic gaffe from Biden, the reality is that the statement was simply a benign description of reality. Beijing is indeed seeking to push the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior in the Indo-Pacific, and testing whether other states will have the resolve to defend mutually beneficial rules in the region.

Even though the Quad has focused on elements like health and food security, as well as development issues like infrastructure, these are all part of a holistic approach to foreign policy. This approach understands that each component of regional resilience adds up to a formidable whole. It is the advancement of stability and resilience in the face of a revisionist China that remains the Quad’s core feature.