QUAD may announce expansion of maritime pact to Indian Ocean: White House

Washington: The QUAD summit has plans to expand the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness initiative from South East Asia to the Indian Ocean Region, the White House said Friday.

The QUAD leadership summit begins Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, with participation of the four member states -- India, US, Japan, and Australia.

The maritime initiative which seeks to keep a check on illegal activities on seas was first launched at the QUAD Leaders Summit in Tokyo two years ago.

A formal announcement about the expansion will be made in Wilmington on Saturday, a senior administration official told reporters on condition of anonymity Besides the expansion, the partnership will now include "new sophisticated technologies to improve the maritime domain picture", as well as new training programmes, the official said.

Another senior administration official said the expansion of the IPMDA to the Indian Ocean "provides opportunities, not just for Australia to coordinate with us in the Pacific, but also with India to coordinate more with a lot of our partners in the Indian Ocean region." "We are also going to be launching as part of our new quad development, increased work together on logistics cooperation. The advent of the QUAD was responding to humanitarian disasters.

"All of our countries have a lot of capacity when it comes to logistics, in the air, at the sea, to respond to these kinds of disasters. We are really pleased that we're going to be piloting this next year with some new work that will allow us to work more closely in this space," the official said.

Responding to a question, the official expressed confidence in the QUAD countries' long term future as like-minded democracies.

"We are, of course, four leading democracies and political change is baked into the cake," the person said.

US President Joe Biden will host Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan for the fourth in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit on Saturday, September 21.