CNN
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President Joe Biden is bringing together the leaders of Australia, India and Japan for a Quad summit in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, this weekend, in a bid to give a final boost to an alliance he hopes will endure beyond his presidency.
The current partnership is about to enter a new era, with half of its leaders, Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, soon to leave office. Eager to cement his foreign policy legacy, the president is turning to alliances like the Quad — which also includes Australia and India — to make a final diplomatic push to counterbalance China’s growing influence as he prepares to hand over to a new administration.
Expected outcomes are expected to include the first-ever joint coast guard exercise among Quad nations, an expansion of an initiative aimed in part at monitoring illegal fishing and collaboration to help reduce cervical cancer rates in the Indo-Pacific, senior administration officials said.
“Welcome to the frontier of Wilmington, Delaware. I’m so glad you could come to my home and see where I grew up,” Biden said in his opening remarks at the summit.
Biden stressed the importance of “democracy” while saying the Quad was “here to stay.”
“We are democracies. Democracies that know how to get things done,” Biden said. “Even though there will be challenges, the world will change, because the Quad is here to stay, I believe. It’s here to stay.”
Biden was then caught saying on Saturday that Chinese President Xi Jinping was seeking to “buy diplomatic space.”
“We believe Xi Jinping is seeking to focus on domestic economic challenges and minimize turbulence in diplomatic relations with China. And he is also seeking to buy diplomatic space, in my view, to aggressively defend China’s interests,” Biden is heard saying.
“China continues to behave aggressively, testing this trend across the region, and that’s true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South China, South Asia, and the Taiwan Strait,” the president continued.
CNN has reached out to the National Security Council, which said it would not comment on the content of the president’s heated discussion.
While national security adviser Jake Sullivan insisted earlier Saturday in a briefing with reporters that “China is not the focus of the Quad,” it is clear from White House accounts of the president’s meetings with other world leaders that China’s increasingly aggressive tactics in the South China Sea will play a significant role at the weekend summit.
Even as officials express confidence in the Quad’s resilience, the question of whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will lead the next administration, and what approach they will take toward alliances and China, could loom large at the weekend meeting as the four leaders chart the next steps in their agenda.
“We are of course four major democracies, and political change is a given,” said a senior administration official speaking ahead of the summit. “We believe the Quad has buy-in across all our systems and at all levels of government.”
The Quad, which Biden elevated to leadership early in his term, has been a key pillar of his Indo-Pacific strategy. China and its aggressive actions in the South China Sea are expected to be high on the agenda when the leaders meet on Saturday, U.S. officials said.
National security communications adviser John Kirby said Wednesday that he expected the leaders to discuss “challenges that still exist in the region due to aggressive PRC military action, for example; unfair trade practices; tensions around the Taiwan Strait.”
The senior administration official said the leaders’ joint statement would include “some of the strongest language the Quad has ever delivered, particularly on the South China Sea and North Korea.”
The leaders are expected to announce a series of measures, including the first-ever joint Coast Guard exercise between the four countries, senior administration officials said. A U.S. Coast Guard ship will take the lead first, hosting counterparts from the Australian, Japanese and Indian Coast Guards for a period of time. Each country plans to do so in turn.
A senior administration official said China should not view the move as a “wake-up call,” saying the coast guard mission “aims to strengthen peace and stability and the continuity of international law in the region.”
The leaders will announce an expansion of the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Partnership, which helps countries monitor illegal fishing and other illegal activities in their waters, to the Indian Ocean and provide partners with more sophisticated technology and training.
They will also launch a logistics network that will allow the U.S. military to share cargo space on aircraft and ships for use in humanitarian aid or disaster relief operations. The partnership will also deploy new open radio access network pilots in the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.
The president will promote the launch of a bipartisan Quad caucus in the House and Senate to tout the United States’ commitment to the partnership, which the Trump administration has also focused on at the foreign minister level.
But the president’s most personal announcement will be about new joint efforts to fight cancer. Quad leaders will launch a new partnership to reduce cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific region, a global extension of the president’s flagship “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, a U.S. official said.
These measures should include efforts to provide more cervical cancer screenings in the region and increase vaccinations against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a leading cause of cervical cancer.
The Cancer Moonshot is one of the president’s most personal initiatives in the White House. The program, which aims to end cancer, was launched when Biden was vice president after his son Beau died of brain cancer. It received a funding boost in 2022, aimed at accelerating cutting-edge cancer research.
The move comes as the president seeks to add a personal touch to his final meeting with Kishida, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The president hosted the leaders in Wilmington, a city about 100 miles north of Washington, D.C., and home to about 71,000 people. India was originally scheduled to host the Quad summit this year but agreed to switch roles as Biden’s term winds down. The leaders are meeting ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week.
Over the course of two days, Biden will host each of the leaders for personal talks at his private residence, where he often travels on weekends. The president met Albanese on Friday and then held similar talks with Kishida and Modi on Saturday.
The one-on-one talks are expected to take place behind closed doors, a departure from most of the president’s bilateral meetings, where journalists typically get to attend at least a limited portion of the event.
The Quad’s main gathering will take place at Archmere Academy, the private Catholic school Biden attends in Claymont, Delaware. It will include a leadership meeting, the Cancer Moonshot event and a private dinner.
The president stopped in Archmere Friday night to greet members of the school’s football team, which Biden was a member of during his high school years. When one student asked him what it felt like to be president, Biden replied, “It’s kind of like being class president. No, I’m kidding.”
Several U.S. presidents have used their own homes to maintain personal relationships with world leaders. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan hosted Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at his ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains of California.
Plans for horseback riding, a shared pastime, were scrapped due to rain on the day of the visit, but the royals and the Reagans spent time together over a Mexican-style lunch of enchiladas and tacos.
President George W. Bush has hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin at his family home twice: once at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2001, and again in 2007 at Walker’s Point, his family’s estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. During that meeting, the two leaders, accompanied by former President George H. W. Bush, went fishing on the sidelines of discussions on missile defense systems.
Trump has hosted several world leaders at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, during his time in office. A visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which included a day of golf, turned into a full-blown diplomatic strategy session when the two leaders were briefed on an unexpected missile launch by North Korea in the middle of a dinner at the private club.
The two men, aided by the light of their assistants’ cell phones, studied documents together on a dimly lit terrace, in full view of all the club’s members and guests.
As Biden turns to his own local diplomacy this weekend, Kirby said he is working to “show them a place and a community that shaped so much of the public servant and leader he has become.”
He added: “It also reflects his belief that, like politics, foreign policy is also a personal matter.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
