Joe Biden’s disappointing decision to abandon the Quad leaders’ summit in Sydney to deal with a political crisis at home is a clear diplomatic blow for Australia and for the region.
It will be celebrated in Beijing because it robs Australia of a historic opportunity to send a clear message to China about the commitment of the key Indo-Pacific democracies to stand up to its military adventurism and economic coercion.
Nothing would have underscored that joint commitment more than the sight of Biden standing alongside Anthony Albanese, India’s Narendra Modi and Japan’s Fumio Kishida in front of the Sydney Opera House.
Instead, Biden triggered the collapse of the Quad summit by giving priority to sorting out the dysfunctional impasse between Republicans and Democrats in Washington over the US debt ceiling.
The decision hands a propaganda victory to Beijing and deals a three-way setback for Australia.
Firstly, it is a setback for the development of the Quad, a body which is vitally important for Australia. This grouping of the four great democracies of the region has gone from strength to strength since 2019, emerging as an ideal forum to strengthen co-operation in the face of China’s rise. The Quad is an idea whose time has come and it will recover from this, but the cancellation of the summit will lead some in Beijing to question whether Washington’s commitment to it is as iron-clad as was believed.
Secondly, visits to Australia by US presidents are rare, difficult to organise, and are a valuable way to underpin our most important alliance. Biden would have been the first US president to visit Australia since Barack Obama in 2014 and the timing of his visit so soon after the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal would have been opportune.
Biden has invited Albanese to Washington for a state visit later this year, and the two meet regularly at overseas forums, but it will now be difficult to reschedule a Biden visit here before the 2024 election. This is an opportunity lost.
Thirdly, Biden was to have been the first sitting president to visit Papua New Guinea, where he was going to announce a new defence co-operation agreement giving US warships and aircraft unimpeded access to PNG waters and airspace.
That agreement is to be welcomed and will still proceed even without the president’s visit. But Biden’s presence would have made a major statement about the importance of PNG at a time when China has been aggressively wooing Port Moresby and other Pacific Island nations such as the Solomons over closer defence ties and potential military bases.
The fact the president chose to abandon the PNG and Australian legs of his Pacific visit to deal with political dysfunction in Washington will be seen by Beijing as further proof of America’s decline.
Albanese was sympathetic in his public statements about the reasons for Biden’s decision to limit his Pacific trip only to the G7 leader’s summit in Hiroshima this weekend. He likened the impasse in congress over the US debt ceiling to Malcolm Fraser blocking supply in 1975.
Albanese says the four Quad leaders will all be at Hiroshima and will seek to hold a slimmed down version of their cancelled Sydney meeting on the summit sidelines. But this is a poor substitute for a full-blown Quad leader’s summit in Sydney.
Biden is not the first president to abandon overseas trips to deal with a budget crisis at home. Obama cancelled a trip to the APEC summit in Indonesia in 2013 for the same reason while Bill Clinton also pulled out of the APEC summit in Japan in 1995 because of a debt ceiling dispute.
Disputes over US debt ceilings – which have to be passed by Congress to ensure the funding of the government – have become a predictable and dysfunctional feature of divided Congresses. In this case Democrats have sought a debt-ceiling increase with no conditions attached, while Republicans want to use it as leverage to cut spending.
The US has never defaulted on its debt because a political solution has always been found, although sometimes at the last minute. Biden hopes to avoid that default by ensuring he is in Washington, rather than Australia, during the ongoing negotiations. He wants to be seen to be taking the issue as seriously as it deserves. But it is debatable whether he really needs to be in the White House for this crisis – the political optics of him being in Washington may be more important than the practical benefits.
Yet what is certain is that by cancelling the Australian and PNG parts of his Pacific trip and forcing the Quad summit to collapse, Biden has delivered a hit to Australia’s interests in the region.
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