Prime Minister Modi’s New York Visit Brings Quad To The Forefront

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, President Joe Biden of the United States, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, at the 2023 Quad Leaders Summit. / X/@narendramodi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States from September 21 to 23 for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (U.N.G.A.). This marks the Prime Minister’s first visit to the United States since winning office for a third successive term. 

On September 22, the Prime Minister will address a large gathering of the Indian diaspora in Long Island, New York. It will also mark a decade since Prime Minister Modi's iconic speech at Madison Square Garden in 2014, which soon began a trend of seeing the Prime Minister’s oratory skills on display in front of large swathes of the global Indian diaspora.

Prime Minister Modi’s trip begins with the much-anticipated fourth Quad Leaders’ Summit on September 21, at Wilmington, Delaware, the home state of President Biden. The other agenda items involve key events in New York City including an address at the Summit for the Future, meetings with global CEOs, the interaction with the diaspora, and bilateral talks with international leaders.

This visit will be pivotal in strengthening the strategic partnership, but 2023 set a very high bar in the history of U.S.-India state visits, cementing an epochal year marking only the third State Visit by a visiting Indian leader to Washington D.C.  The State Visit galvanized U.S.-India ties in new areas as both Prime Minister Modi and President Biden paved the way for a concrete strategic roadmap and new dialogues and initiatives in multifaceted areas such as clean energy cooperation, education, space collaboration, semiconductors, quantum computing, drone technology, artificial intelligence, with accelerated joint projects such as manufacturing GE F-414 jet engines in India, putting India in the elite club of countries with such manufacturing capability.

The State Visit also accelerated an era of deep defense synergy in new areas of critical and emerging technology such as the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) and, subsequently, the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X), a joint initiative by the Indian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

The recently concluded third edition of INDUS-X was a resounding success and USISPF was proud to partner with both governments and Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center and the Hoover Institution. Leading defense policymakers from Washington and New Delhi touched on strengthening defense ties and advancing the technology relationship between the two most vibrant democracies bringing startups, tech giants, VCs, and academics into the stakeholder relationship.

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the Quad, which arose from a nebulous grouping focused on catering to relief work in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami to now being, a grouping of a $35 trillion set of economics, dedicated to security cooperation, multilateral diplomacy, economic relief within the Indo-Pacific region. 

While it was New Delhi’s turn to host the Quad Summit in 2024, Indian elections from April to June and U.S. elections in November, precluded formal scheduling. However, India will host the next Quad Summit in 2025.

This edition of the Quad leader’s gathering is a bit of a deja vu, as the first in-person principal-level Quad Summit took place in Washington, during the time of UNGA back in 2021 in the middle of the raging pandemic. With President Biden and Prime Minister Kishida not seeking re-election, Prime Minister Modi will soon be the only one of the four leaders to have been there since the start of the Quad leader's summit. 

The agenda for this year’s summit will be reviewing the progress of the Quad and setting the vision that the four countries wish to achieve, not only for their democracies but for other countries in the wider Indo-Pacific region. The summit will center on regional security, Indo-Pacific strategy, and shifting trends in global diplomacy. Beyond geopolitical and security issues, the discussions will also explore opportunities for deeper collaboration in areas of critical technology, with a focus on AI, quantum semiconductors, biotechnology, and cyber. This will tie in seamlessly with recent policy discussions at the INDUS-X, on cementing deeper areas of collaboration. 

With the concurrence of Climate Week, there is a pressing need to achieve energy security, cut emissions, secure climate financing for emerging economies, and build a green economy for the Global South and hence, along with security and tech dialogues, the climate agenda will also take precedence, as infrastructure and development finance require a consensus-building approach.

Over the last decade, Washington policymakers have made a conscientious shift, from once focusing on trans-Atlantic relations to now prioritizing the Indo-Pacific and its littoral states. We saw Indo-Pacific take precedence under the Trump administration and further fructified under President Biden who convened the first in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit. So irrespective, of who wins the White House in January 2025, the Indo-Pacific will not only be accentuated but will be central to U.S. national security decision-making.

Beijing’s belligerence in the South China Sea threatens not only the littoral states, but the tempestuous climate created by China across the East China Sea affects both Taiwan’s security and the semiconductor supply chain, vital to the next-gen technology. 

Both Washington and New Delhi will use the Quad Summit, to build on Indian Defence Minister, Rajnath Singh’s successful visit to the U.S. This was the first Minister visit by a Cabinet Member from India in Modi 3.0, and his meetings with his counterpart in Mr. Lloyd Austin III, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor (NSA) yielded in the successful signing of the Security of Supplies Arrangement (S.O.S.A.). This agreement is vital to strengthening resilient supply chains, a problem upended by the pandemic and one that is essential in a China plus one strategy.

As this is President Biden’s final in-person Quad Leader’s Summit, irrespective of who his successor will be, the vision remains etched for a robust bipartisan approach, where Washington will continue to work with New Delhi, Canberra, and Tokyo and remain steadfast in securing a free and open Indo-Pacific. 

 

The author is the President of the United States-India Strategic Partnership Forum.

 

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad)