Australia Quad summit cancelled as Biden to head back from Japan to address US debt limit deadlock

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, May 17

Next week’s leaders’ meeting of the Quad in Canberra has been cancelled, and the leaders will instead meet on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in Japan this weekend, said Australian PM Anthony Albanese after receiving a 4.30 am call from US President Joe Biden expressing his inability to make it to Australia due to the deadlock over debt limit in the US.

There is no word from Delhi yet whether PM Narendra Modi will go ahead with the Australian visit, which also includes a mega Indian community event as well as a bilateral meeting with Albanese.

PM Modi is slated to leave for Hiroshima for the G7 meet on May 19. India is among the five developing countries invited to attend some of the deliberations of the G7 summit. A planned interaction with Biden on its sidelines is likely to go ahead. 

The PM will then visit Papua New Guinea (PNG) where he will co-chair the third India-Pacific Island Countries’ (PIC) summit. Biden, too, was supposed to visit PNG for a separate US-PIC summit. That, too, has been cancelled. The two leaders were to then go to Australia for the Quad meeting where the Australian and the Japanese PMs were to join them for deliberations.

Earlier, the White House said Biden would return to the US after the completion of the G7 summit, in order to be back for meetings to ensure that Congress takes action by the deadline to avert default. 

Biden spoke to Albanese earlier on Wednesday to inform him that he would be postponing his trip to Australia, it said. The President’s team engaged with the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea’s team to inform them as well, it added.