(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden is spending the final months of his term tightening the screws on China, capping an approach that has seen him carry out a difficult juggling act in office to counter the world’s second largest economy.
That effort will be on display this weekend as Biden hosts the Quad Leaders Summit in Wilmington, Delaware, bringing Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India, Fumio Kishida of Japan and Anthony Albanese of Australia to his hometown.
The president has made enlisting allies and like-minded partners to counter Beijing’s influence in the economic sphere as well as its security ambitions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait a key pillar of his China policy.
The summit is unfolding against the backdrop of a US election pitting Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris against the isolationist tendencies of Republican former President Donald Trump – with the future of Biden’s approach and the fate of the Quad itself potentially hinging on that vote.
With the clock ticking on his White House tenure, Biden’s administration is moving to finalize actions that have been months or years in the making and that target Beijing’s economic might. The measures have been well-telegraphed both publicly and privately — a longstanding Biden effort to employ what officials call “intensive diplomacy” – aimed at not blindsiding China while allowing cooperation on other fronts to proceed.
Biden is also set to hold a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping soon and might meet him in-person in the coming months on the sidelines of international summits in South America.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Saturday said leaders would announce a Quad cancer moonshot effort to boost efforts to find cures, the expansion of an initiative to prevent illicit maritime activities, plans to pre-position relief supplies across the region to better respond to disasters and the group’s first-ever coast guard mission together.
But Sullivan cautioned against seeing the Quad’s work “as being directed at China,” even as he acknowledged Beijing’s actions in the region were a matter for the group’s discussions.
“The purpose of the Quad is not to come together around China or any other countries, it’s to come together around how to construct a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Sullivan told reporters. “These issues are on the agenda because they relate to a free and open Indo-Pacific, but China is not the focus of the Quad and the Quad is not about one country.”
‘Tying the Bows’
The US administration has announced and finalized new tariffs on certain Chinese goods, cracked down on de minimis exemptions for Chinese shipments of cheap online shopping orders, and curbed shipments of steel and aluminum from China and elsewhere through Mexico.
Biden’s team also warned Beijing not to finance Russian entities’ transactions to aid Vladimir Putin’s war machine, and the president signed an executive order that would allow him to impose secondary sanctions on such institutions – though he has yet to make use of those powers.
“There’s a kind of a symphony of things they’ve been trying to do — they’re interlocking pieces, and trying to make sure all of the pieces fit right,” said Jacob Stokes, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former Biden adviser. “It’s tying the bows.”
The US also is moving toward restricting certain Chinese vehicles from its roads entirely and firming an updated agreement with Japan and the Netherlands — two major suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment — to further curb exports to China.
Biden and Albanese will discuss their AUKUS submarine deal with the UK, which Beijing has railed against and accused the US of using to contain China.
Quad’s Future
The president has tapped an intimate setting for the last Quad summit of his administration in Wilmington, home to about 70,000 people and far from the pomp of Washington galas. Still, the city is just a few hours drive from the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week, which has world leaders converging on the US.
Biden will host leaders at his home and his former school, and wants to showcase a community “that shaped so much of the public servant and the leader that he became,” said US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
But looming over the summit are questions about the future of the Quad, even as senior US officials expressed confidence it can endure elections in the coming year in three member nations, citing bipartisan support in Congress and the fact that the grouping met at the foreign minister level during the Trump administration.
Kishida will step down in the coming weeks amid his party’s leadership elections, and Albanese faces his own reelection fight within the next nine months.
The leaders’ joint statement this weekend will include the strongest language on the South China Sea ever produced by the group, one of the officials said, adding that it showcases convergence on the shared challenges that China and other actors pose in the region.
That “hasn’t worked to deter China from its malicious activities,” said Justin Bassi, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “This meeting — Biden’s last — needs to set that tone and if they are able to follow through and publicly explain to everybody why the Quad exists, then we’ll all be better for it.”
Backing Up Talk
US Congressman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called on the Quad to back up its talk on China.
“We need to align our strategies with our actions. I hope to see further multilateral initiatives announced at the Quad summit this weekend to hold China accountable and promote a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” he said, echoing a tagline that each of the group’s partners has used to mark concern over Beijing’s actions.
The Quad can balance China by cooperating on resource exploration, mining technology and financing, said Gracelin Baskaran, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One of the primary goals of Quad collaboration is to build that diversified and resilient supply chain,” she said.
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But how far Biden can align his partners remains to be seen.
The administration has long counted on India to provide an alternative to China, including as a manufacturing hub, but there’s little sign India would bless a foray into more direct counter-balancing.
“There is not much that Modi can offer in the security domain against China which doesn’t further provoke Beijing,” said Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University.
--With assistance from Ben Westcott, Sudhi Ranjan Sen and Alastair Gale.
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