President Biden’s decision to shorten his upcoming Asia trip and skip a meeting of leaders of the strategic U.S.-India-Japan-Australia “Quad” group to deal with the national debt crisis marks a blow to the ongoing U.S. campaign to show itself as a reliable partner for countering China’s increasingly aggressive rise in the region and on the world stage.
The change in plans also risks tarnishing U.S. influence in the Pacific, analysts say, and it fuels perceptions that Washington is too gripped by dysfunction and partisan bickering at home to lead the Quad. The alignment of powerful democracies began more than a decade ago but gained momentum under President Trump as a counter to China’s rising influence.
The cancellation proved a blow to U.S. soft power as well. Papua New Guinea declared a national holiday to mark Mr. Biden’s expected three-hour stop in the country early next week in what would have been the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to any Pacific Island nation.
Mr. Biden planned to attend a much-anticipated summit with his Japanese, Indian and Australian counterparts in Sydney after the summit this weekend in Japan of the more broadly focused Group of Seven leading industrial nations. His decision on Tuesday to truncate the trip and stop only in Japan led Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to call off the Sydney summit entirely.
Mr. Albanese rejected the idea of holding the summit in Sydney without Mr. Biden. He said the Quad leaders would instead squeeze in time to talk on the sidelines of the G-7. The economic summit in Japan will be far less visible and in-depth than the canceled gathering and will give Beijing an opening to argue that the Quad is not a serious grouping.
“It makes us look like we don’t follow through,” said Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute.
SEE ALSO: Biden arrives in Hiroshima for G-7 talks overshadowed by the debt limit crisis
“The reason the Quad is so important is because it is the most vital latent alliance for a military war machine that could come into being to counter China if the Chinese were to start to use military force in the region,” he said. “Right now, the Quad is not an alliance, but it could become an alliance if the Chinese go on a war footing.
“I understand why [Mr. Biden] had to cancel, if the alternative is going into a debt default. … But the fact that we canceled this part of the trip shows once again that U.S. administrations have trouble following through on the national interest, and that’s frustrating,” he said. “It’s part of our strategy to pivot to Asia to counter Chinese assertiveness and to rally allies and partners as part of a counterweight to China’s threat.
“It’s not our lack of commitment, but our dysfunction,” Mr. Cronin said. “Time and again, it doesn’t matter who the president is — Obama, Trump, Biden — our government fails to follow through on what we know is important in the region.”
The latest in a line of presidential trips to the region cut short by complications back in Washington was poorly received in much of the region — and was immediately trumpeted by China.
The nationalistic, state-controlled Global Times headline on Wednesday said, “Biden skips two legs of trip, erodes US credibility.”
“It shows that when its own domestic political demands override its international agenda, the U.S. will turn back on its commitment with no hesitation,” Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, told the Beijing news website.
Some prominent voices among U.S. allies were no less critical.
Mr. Biden’s decision to pass on stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea “will raise questions about the reliability of the United States as a regional ally, let alone its competency to manage its own affairs,” Australian Financial Review political editor Phillip Coorey wrote in a commentary.
Embarrassing the Aussies
The development is also likely to prove embarrassing for Australia and its prime minister.
One of the country’s flagship newspapers, The Australian, reported that literally hours before Mr. Biden’s pullout of the planned visit, Mr. Albanese was describing the Quad gathering as the “most important international event to be held in Australia since the [Group of 20 summit] in Brisbane in 2014.”
Mr. Biden’s visit was likely to highlight progress in the new AUKUS alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom, including a breakthrough security deal to supply Canberra with nuclear submarines as it gears up for a Chinese challenge.
“I am pleased that President Biden has been able to take up my invitation to address Parliament,” the prime minister told the paper, only to announce hours later that there would be neither an address nor a gathering of world leaders in Sydney. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly will travel to Sydney for bilateral talks.
Mr. Albanese told reporters on Wednesday that “the blocking and the disruption that’s occurring in domestic politics in the United States, with the debt ceiling issue, means that … [Mr. Biden] understandably has had to make that decision.”
A different kind of disappointment was coursing through Papua New Guinea.
The strategically located island nation, which has been in the crosshairs of a Cold War-style geopolitical tug of war between China and the U.S. in recent years, engaged in extensive preparations for the now-scrubbed visit.
The Associated Press reported that police were tightening security, billboards were going up, and people were getting ready to sing and dance in the streets. “I am very honored that he has fulfilled his promise to me to visit our country,” Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said on Facebook.
Many of the festivities will go ahead, and Mr. Modi reportedly will meet with Pacific Island leaders. Still, many in Papua New Guinea told reporters that they felt deflated.
“Everyone was excited,” said Steven Ranewa, a lawyer in the capital, Port Moresby. “But now that it’s been canceled, it’s really demoralizing.”
During the Trump and Biden administrations, Washington has been the driving force in developing the Quad. The U.S. and Asia’s three most powerful democracies shared a mutual interest in upholding the rules-based international order that China’s communist regime has vowed to challenge.
Analysts in all four of the major democracies say China is eroding the order on numerous fronts, including aggressive territorial claims in international waters, intellectual property theft by companies aligned with China’s ruling Communist Party, and predatory lending by state-backed Chinese institutions to developing countries badly in need of foreign investment.
The summit in Sydney would have been the Quad’s fifth top-level gathering.
Ahead of a leader-level summit in 2021, a senior Biden administration official told The Washington Times that “the Quad is definitely going to be a central focus of overall U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific moving forward.”
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe first suggested the Quad as a strategic forum in 2007. The Trump administration embraced and openly pushed the concept, highlighting the potential relevance of the grouping in its 2017 Indo-Pacific strategy.
Hawkish foreign policy analysts described the Trump-era push as the beginning of an “Asian NATO.”
Chinese officials have bristled at the notion. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi accused the Trump administration of using the Quad “to trumpet the Cold War mentality and to stir up confrontation” aimed at maintaining the “dominance and hegemonic system of the United States,” the South China Morning Post reported.
Hear Washington Times national security team leader Guy Taylor and Asia bureau chief Andrew Salmon discuss the difficulties facing the U.S., South Korea and Japan in contending with Chinese influence and North Korean nuclear threats:
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.