There’s no place like home for Joe Biden — which is why the US president is bringing the leaders of Australia, Japan and India to his beloved Delaware hometown for a farewell summit on Saturday.
The meeting in Wilmington in the twilight of Biden’s one-term presidency reflects the importance that the 81-year-old has placed on the so-called “Quad” group as a counterweight to a rising China.
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Biden will host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for private, one-on-one meetings at his house in the city some 110 miles (176 kilometers) from Washington, having met Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese there on Friday night.
All the leaders will then travel to Biden’s former high school in Wilmington for a four-way meeting, followed by an event for his “Cancer Moonshot” initiative and then an intimate dinner.
As Biden tries to establish his legacy after dropping out of November’s presidential election and handing the campaign reins to Kamala Harris, officials say there will be “deliverables” from the summit.
They include the first joint coast guard exercises between the four nations — a key step in a region where maritime tensions with China over its claims to the South China Sea are ever present.
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A senior Biden administration official insisted that “we would not in any way consider this to be a red flag of any kind” to China, saying it was designed to “uphold and enforce international law.”
The White House said however that China would be “high on the agenda” amid tensions with Beijing, particularly over a series of recent confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the disputed South China Sea.
But the summit also takes place in the shadow of a possible return to power of Donald Trump, with his election race against Harris, the US vice president, on a knife edge.
– ‘Quad will endure’ –
The Quad grouping dates back to 2007, but Biden was the first to set up leaders’ summits and has strongly pushed it as part of an emphasis on international alliances after the isolationist Trump years.
US officials however played down any risk to the grouping.
“We are quite confident in the fact that the Quad will endure,” the senior administration official said, adding that the first Quad meetings of ministers happened under the Trump administration.
For the United States, Australia and Japan, the Quad is also a long-term courtship of India. New Delhi is traditionally insistent on its non-aligned status when it comes to contests between superpowers.
The White House faced criticism for giving only limited access to the press throughout the weekend, with reporters questioning whether it was at the request of the notoriously media-shy Modi.
But above all, the summit in Biden’s hometown is “a reflection of his deep personal relationships with each of the Quad Leaders,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Biden is famously proud of his home in Wilmington and frequently spends weekends there, away from the confines of the White House.
It has long been a refuge for a president who has always focused on family, and for much of his extensive political career commuted into Washington daily from there.
The property hit the headlines when classified documents were found in Biden’s garage, next to his Corvette sports car, in 2022. Biden was not charged.
What foreign leaders will make of Wilmington — a community of around 71,000 people whose downtown has the somewhat hollowed out and rundown feel of many post-Covid American cities — remains to be seen.