WASHINGTON (Kyodo) — The administration of President Joe Biden is confident that the four-way grouping the United States has formed with Australia, India and Japan, known as the Quad, will endure for many years to come even if domestic politics shift in the member states, a senior White House official said Thursday.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, White House senior director for East Asia and Oceania, said the grouping of the major maritime democracies represents not “any one administration or set of views, but rather a set of enduring interests” shared by all four countries.
She said during a press briefing that the U.S. administration also expects there to be a full commitment to the Quad by whoever may succeed Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“We see ourselves as increasingly in lockstep in terms of our strategic alignment,” she said, two days before Biden will host a summit of the four countries in Wilmington, his hometown in Delaware.
Biden, who withdrew from the presidential race in July, will be participating in a Quad summit for the last time. It will be the same for Kishida, who has decided not to run for reelection in the upcoming leadership race of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.
The Japanese ruling party, which Kishida has been heading since 2021, will pick his successor in its presidential election on Sept. 27.
The Quad is seen as a counter to China’s increasing influence in the Indo-Pacific region. The four countries held the first summit of their partnership in 2021 in Tokyo.
China has criticized the grouping as an Asian version of NATO, although it is not a security alliance. The areas of its cooperation include infrastructure, critical technologies, climate change, maritime domain awareness and natural disaster response.
US confident Quad to continue beyond tenures of Biden, Kishida
