The White House announced on Friday that the QUAD summit intends to take the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness initiative to the Indian Ocean Region, rather than just South East Asia. The QUAD leadership summit begins on Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, with members of the four member states: India, the US, Japan, and Australia. The maritime initiative, which has been aimed at keeping a check on the illegal activities on seas, was first launched at the QUAD Leaders Summit in Tokyo two years ago.
A formal statement on the agreement is to be made Saturday in Wilmington, a senior administration official told reporters privately. In addition to the extension, the alliance is now also to entail "new advanced technologies for better maritime domain awareness," and new training programs, the official said.
Another senior administration official said expanding the IPMDA into the Indian Ocean "actually provides opportunities, not just for Australia to coordinate with us in the Pacific, but also with India to coordinate more with a lot of our partners in the Indian Ocean region." They added: "We are also going to be launching as part of our new quad development, increased work together on logistics cooperation. The advent of the QUAD was responding to humanitarian disasters.".
"All of our countries have a lot of capacity when it comes to logistics in the air, at the sea, to respond to these kinds of disasters. We are really pleased that we're going to be piloting this next year with some new work that will allow us to work more closely in this space," the official said. Responding to a question, the official said that he is confident about the long term future of the QUAD countries as like-minded democracies. "We are, of course four leading democracies and political change is baked into the cake, he said.
US President Joe Biden will host Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, and Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan for the fourth in-person Quad Leaders' Summit on Saturday, September 21.
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