As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio travels to India later this month for a Quad foreign ministers meeting (MEA will confirm closer to date), the million dollar question: is this about soothing ruffled feathers given that he and his boss were due last year when India was Quad chair?
It would appear that Modi refusing to endorse President Trump’s claim of bringing an end to the conflict with Pakistan last year, strains over tariffs and a delayed trade deal, may have put the big man off.
But there were a reported eight telephone conversations between Trump and Modi last year and at least three so far this year. And US Ambassador Sergio Gor has been active since moving into the job in January. He is Trump’s personal choice for New Delhi.
The answer, Brig Arun Sahgal of the Forum for Security Initiatives argues, may lie elsewhere. “Quad is comatose because the US is too busy fighting in the Persian Gulf to have much time for the Indo-Pacific.”
The point has weight. But Trump could have considered a short visit to India en route to his summit with Xi Jinping towards the middle of this month. Even that isn’t happening, either because the president is too preoccupied with the Iran war or is not inclined given how relations with India have panned out.
Even on defence, expectations are low. “Nothing new is likely,” said a senior former diplomat, “the GE-404/414 engine technology transfer will go through but anything beyond that may not happen given that Trump is opposed to US technology going out of the country.”
The irony is inescapable: Trump revived the Quad in 2017 and India took time making up its mind about the group. Now the same man torpedoes it.
So again the question, is the Rubio visit all about soothing India’s ruffled feathers? An analysis in The South China Morning Post quoting Sourabh Gupta of the Institute for China-America Studies, said as much:
“The outcomes in practice will not be worth the paper on which they are written. (This is) more farce than tragedy”.
Foreign Affairs journal put it even more brutally, headlining an article The Quad is on the Brink of Extinction. It says the grouping cannot endure another two and a half years of Trump. But it makes a caveat:
The key is whether Trump will attend the Quad summit in Queensland, Australia later this year. Australia holds the rotating chair of the Quad for 2026 but Trump appears to have a beef with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“I’m not happy with Australia because they were not there when we asked them to be there. They were not there having to do with Hormuz,” Trump said on SkyNews last month.
Albanese says there was no formal US request for a naval coalition to fight in the strait and Australia was not taking part in any offensive action.
If Trump gives the Quad a miss this year, Foreign Affairs says “it will be relegated to geopolitical insignificance and it may even spell the end of the grouping entirely.”
For now its fingers crossed for India and Australia.
