On September 21 of this year, a summit meeting of the four countries participating in the Quad configuration was held in Wilmington, Delaware.
The latest Quad summit took place amidst all sorts of uncertainties
However, information soon emerged that these leaders may meet much earlier (in the second half of September), on the sidelines of the next UN General Assembly. The sudden need for an “early” meeting was apparently caused by the rather unexpected end of the political career of US President Joseph Biden, the de factor initiator of the Quad configuration. The event itself was just one manifestation of the rapidly increasing uncertainty in the domestic political environment of the US, the main participant in the grouping.
However, it soon became clear that another member of the configuration, Japan, is going through a period of no less uncertainty. Just two weeks after the above-mentioned ministerial meeting, Fumio Kishida announced his resignation from the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan and, consequently, from the post of prime minister. And he now cannot appear in that capacity at the UN General Assembly. And, therefore the planned meeting on the sidelines of that event, at the UN headquarters in New York, had to be abandoned.
Therefore, in order to organize the urgently needed Quad summit at short notice—with two of the participants now no longer real leaders but just sitting out their terms, it was necessary to find a new venue in the US. Wilmington, Delaware, Joe Biden’s home town, was chosen, and the Quad summit at first (misleadingly) appeared to be an insignificant farewell party to mark the retirement from public affairs of half of the participants. But, as it turned out, the very real leaders of India and Australia, Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese, will have something meaningful to convey to their new colleagues at the next Quad summit.
However, when this will happen remains unclear, as nothing was said about it at the end of the Wilmington summit. It appears that this was also due to political uncertainty already........