WASHINGTON >> President Joe Biden is hosting the leaders of Australia, India and Japan at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, this weekend, seeking to use his fourth and final “Quad summit” to cement the alliance between the United States and Indo-Pacific nations and to counter China’s rising influence in the region.
Biden will use the summit to expand his “cancer moonshot” program and the Quad Fellowship, a scholarship program designed to build ties among the next generation of scientists and technologists. The four leaders will sign a maritime agreement and announce a joint Coast Guard mission.
There will be no specific policies aimed at China, according to Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser. But when Biden meets with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Sullivan said, they will discuss how they see China’s actions in the region and where China is headed, and will work to try to coordinate approaches “to the extent that makes sense for both countries.”
Biden has often said that “all politics is personal,” and the decision to open his home in Wilmington — the first time he has invited foreign leaders there — reflected his conviction that deep relationships are the best way to forge constructive alliances. With just a few months left in the president’s term, this year’s summit will have a personal touch.
On Friday night, when the president had a one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, he gave Albanese a tour of his home and told those in attendance to get comfortable and take off their jackets.
“The vibe of it was sort of two guys, one at the other guy’s home, talking in broad strokes about where they see the state of the world, you know, swapping some stories from their respective political careers,” Sullivan told reporters today. It felt, he said, as if “you had someone come over for a cup of coffee.”
Biden was scheduled to have one-on-one meetings with the other two leaders — Modi and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan — at his home today. All four leaders were to meet for a more formal session in the afternoon at Archmere Academy, where the president went to high school, and have an “intimate” dinner there in the evening, a White House spokesperson said.
Although the Quad alliance has been in existence for more than a decade, Biden was the first president to convene a meeting among the leaders of the nations as a foursome. It reflects his belief that, in addition to bilateral meetings and large gatherings like the Group of 20, there is value in what Sullivan called a “latticework approach with multiple institutions, overlapping partnerships, different configurations.”
The president’s first Quad summit, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2021, was virtual. Biden used the meeting to announce a partnership with Japan, India and Australia to finance a dramatic expansion of vaccine manufacturing capacity in India, which would in turn help address an acute shortage of COVID-19 vaccines in Southeast Asia.
This year’s summit will also address health issues. Later today, the leaders were set to unveil a new collaboration — the Quad Cancer Moonshot Initiative — aimed at reducing cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific region. Some countries in the area, particularly poor and remote island nations, have especially high rates of the disease.
The initiative is being spearheaded by Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Australia, a country that has already made great strides in reducing the incidence of cervical cancer. The program will focus on expanding cervical cancer screening; increasing vaccinations against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a common sexually transmitted infection that is the primary cause of cervical cancer; and treating patients.
It will be supported by Gavi, an international organization that works to expand access to vaccines. In June, Jill Biden, the first lady, announced a five-year commitment of $1.58 billion to Gavi.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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