Hopeful of QUAD meeting early next year: Australian PM Anthony Albanese
India was to host the leaders of Australia, the US and Japan for a summit this year, but this now looks unlikely due to political turmoil in Japan and some tensions in India-US relations.
“The Quad is an important forum and an important tool for us to engage with Australia, the US, Japan and India,” Albanese said at a press conference on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit here on Sunday. he said.
Adding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the Quad meeting, he said, “I hope that a meeting will be held in the first quarter of next year.”
Answering a question about the future of QUAD and this year’s meeting, the Australian prime minister said that this was a “busy summit season” and that US President Donald Trump was experiencing a “busy period”.
Trump is on a tri-nation visit to Asia. He was in Malaysia for the ASEAN summit and from there he headed to Japan. From there, he will travel to South Korea, where he is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Media reports in early August claimed that Trump “no longer has plans” to visit India for the Quad Summit this year and detailed how relations between the American leader and Prime Minister Modi had “thaw”. Relations between New Delhi and Washington are reeling under severe strain after Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods, including a 25 percent tax on New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
India called the US action “unfair, unjust and unreasonable”.
