It is official. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar will fly to Tokyo next week to attend the first high profile in-person meeting of the Quad—a group of countries including the USA, Japan, Australia and India.
He will be joined by the foreign ministers of Australia, Japan and America on October 6 and 7. This meeting comes as tensions between India and China are at an all-time high.
“It is timely that foreign ministers of the four nations who share the same ambitions over regional matters exchange views over various challenges,” Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said at a press conference.
“The ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ vision is increasingly important in the post COVID-19 world so we would like to confirm the importance of further deepening the collaboration among us and many other countries to realize the vision,” he said, adding he intends to hold bilateral talks with each of his counterparts.
The meeting will be the first diplomatic high profile outreach by the new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. This will also be Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's last major interaction before America goes to elections.
The Quad meeting also comes as China’s relations with each of its countries is less than warm. Australia’s relations with China soured after its call for an independent probe into the origins of the coronavirus, while the US has been unabashed about blaming China for the pandemic. While Japan is one of the largest trading partners with China, tensions have been simmering especially around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China is eyeing too.
The Quad had also featured In the first phone call between Suga and Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week. Prime Minister Suga expressed his intention to promote bilateral cooperation in the fields of security, economy and economic cooperation, and to work with India towards achieving a 'Free and Open Indo-Pacific,' a press release issued by the Japanese foreign ministry read.
“Prime Minister Suga also stated that he would like to promote cooperation in such multilateral mechanism as Japan-Australia-India-US meetings and the United Nations…’’ it stated.
For India too, which had till recently been reluctant about the Quad, the grouping has become more important. It allows collective pressure against a more assertive belligerent China. While the members have made it clear that it is not an anti-China grouping, in the pandemic, it is being viewed much more as a counter to the might of China. Pompeo has made it clear when he said there was a need to build a “NATO-like” collective structure in the Indo-Pacific. Last week, the Secretary of Defence Mark Esper too highlighted the need for America to focus on collective security alliance in the Indo-Pacific.
"When China has to think about a potential conflict with the United States, it just can't think about the United States. It has to think about the United States and Japan and Australia and Korea, Singapore and whoever else," he was quoted as saying last week at an online seminar.
