On Friday morning, U.S. President Joe Biden is hosting the first-ever Quad summit with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The deliverables are set to be impressive: In addition to the maritime security cooperation usually associated with the Quad—short for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—Biden and his counterparts will agree on a major initiative for the region on COVID-19, officials familiar with the discussions say. With U.S. biotechnology, Japanese funding, Indian production, and Australian logistics, the four leaders will commit to providing 1 billion doses of vaccine to Southeast Asia, the region most directly exposed to Chinese pressure and expansionism.
After months of Beijing’s self-congratulatory “wolf warrior” diplomacy leveraging its successes in handling the pandemic, the maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific will thereby deliver a stunning coup that is likely to permanently reverse the vaccine diplomacy wars. The four leaders will also agree to strengthen cooperation on securing supplies of rare-earth metals, driven by wariness of dependence on China for these critical inputs to technology and defense production at a time when Beijing is slapping boycotts on any country that displeases it.
