Washington: In a sign perhaps of the second Trump administration’s priorities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first foreign engagement will be a meeting of the Quad foreign ministers later on Tuesday followed by bilateral meetings with each of them, starting with External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar.
Rubio became the first of President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to be confirmed by the US Senate. He was approved unanimously by all Democrats voting with the Republicans who control the chamber. He was sworn in Tuesday morning by Vice-President J D Vance.
Rubio, who is a former Senator from Florida, will address the employees of the US State Department, according to a schedule released earlier. His first foreign engagement will be a meeting with “Indo-Pacific Quad Foreign Ministers” at the State Department — India’s Jaishankar, Australia’s Penny Wong and Japan’s Iwaya Takeshi. This meeting will be followed by a separate one-on-one meeting between Rubio and the foreign ministers; Jaishankar first, the schedule mentioned.
It was President Donald Trump’s first administration that resurrected the Quad, which was formed after the 2004 Tsunami and had fallen apart in 2008, with a meeting of officials on the sidelines of the 2017 meeting of ASEAN in Manila. From that first meeting, the group rapidly progressed to the level of foreign ministers, who first met on the margins of the UN General Assembly meetings in 2019 in New York. They met for the second time in October 2020.
President Joe Biden elevated the group to the level of leaders with a virtual summit in March 2021, just two months after taking office. The first in-person summit was held in September the same year and the leaders have met once every year since. The last Quad summit was hosted by President Biden at his home and school in Wilmington in his home state of Delaware.
The next summit is scheduled to be hosted by India, later this year.
(IANS)
