WORLD & NATION US at G7 summit: ‘Future of our world’ being written in Indo-Pacific
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Japan that “a great deal of the future of our world is going to be written in the Indo-Pacific.”
Biden met with prime ministers Narendra Modi of India, Anthony Albanese of Australia and Fumio Kishida of Japan. Together with the United States, the countries make up the Quad Alliance which aims to push back China’s influence in the region.
“Our mission remains the same. And that is to advance our vision of a free, open, secure, prosperous IndoPacific,” Biden said.
Kishida warned that the security environment has become even more difficult since the alliance’s most recent meeting last year. Modi announced that the next summit of the four countries would be hosted by India in 2024.
The Quad Alliance countries had actually planned to meet at a separate summit in Australia in a few days.
Biden had to cancel the trip to Australia and planned stopover in Papua New Guinea on short notice however, because of a domestic budget crisis.
The Quad Alliance thus met briefly in Hiroshima on the sidelines of the G7 summit.
Biden has put a special
focus on the Indo-Pacific in his administration’s foreign policy since taking office.
He also established the annual Quad meetings.
The Indo-Pacific roughly stretches from the Indian Ocean to the northern Pacific Ocean, thus covering most of Asia and extending to the U.S. West Coast.
Meanwhile, the U.S. kept a close eye on the war in Ukraine at the G7 summit.
The Biden administration
was working on Saturday to dispel the impression that its newly announced support for a fighter jet coalition for Ukraine was a political U-turn.
“Nothing has changed,” Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said.
The U.S. had never taken F-16 fighter jets off the table before, he insisted.
Biden informed the G7 leaders in Hiroshima on Friday that the U.S. would support
the joint allied training of Ukrainian pilots on fourthgeneration fighter jets, including the F-16.
Once the training gets under way, it would be decided when and how many aircraft would be delivered and who in the coalition would provide them.
Biden and other top members of the U.S. government had for months publicly rejected pleas from Kyiv for F16s, saying the jets were not
needed for Ukraine’s military offenses to beat back Russian forces.
Sullivan said the decision on arms deliveries to Ukraine had always followed the needs of the war effort and that the White House had always left the door open.
Now, he said, “we’ve reached a moment where it is time to look down the road” and assess what Ukrainian forces need in the longterm to deter and repel Russian
aggression — and that’s where the fighter jets came in.
Asked whether the lengthy training of Ukrainian pilots on the jets should not have started much earlier, Sullivan said the F-16s were not needed now on the battlefield in the U.S. assessment, but only for the long-term build-up of Ukrainian forces.
He did not comment on how long the training of Ukrainian pilots would take and when a decision on a concrete delivery of jets to Kyiv might be made. Several European militaries have a supply of the U.S.-made F-16s.
When asked about the potential for escalation in the war, because such jets could possibly be used for attacks over Russian territory, Sullivan emphasized that all arms deliveries to Ukraine were fundamentally subject to the premise that the U.S. would not enable or support attacks on Russian soil.
So far, Ukraine has clearly adhered to this premise, he said.
Sullivan also said that Biden expects to meet his Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for bilateral talks in Hiroshima.
Zelenskyy made a surprise appearance at the G7 summit on Saturday and held talks with several top diplomats.
He has engaged in a flurry of diplomatic visits in recent days as part of his efforts to secure Western fighter jets.
On Friday, he hailed Biden’s F-16 decision as “historic.”