Bipartisan push grows for Quad summit before Trump’s China trip

A bipartisan chorus of lawmakers and national security experts in Washington is calling on the administration of US President Donald Trump to convene a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue leaders’ summit ahead of Trump’s expected meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in April.The push aims to project a unified front among Indo-Pacific democracies and prevent potential misunderstandings during high-stakes negotiations with Beijing. The Quad, an informal grouping that also includes Japan and Australia, is widely seen as a mechanism to counter China’s influence in the strategically vital region.“There is real potential for misunderstanding or misalignment on China policy,” Lindsey Ford, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington, told the China-economic-and-security-review-commission" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="32181" data-entity-type="organization">US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on Tuesday. The USCC is responsible for providing recommendations to Congress.Ford, who served as former US president Joe Biden’s senior adviser on South Asia policy, added that US policymakers should make it a “priority to engage at the highest levels with India, both before and after high level meetings” and better coordinate on China policy.Tanvi Madan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a prominent public policy institute in Washington, testified that there should also be “bilateral or Quad consultations to coordinate ahead of key regional and global summits”.She urged “stepping up of Quad activities quantitatively and qualitatively in the security, economic security and technology domains”, describing the Quad as a minilateral “designed in part to offset Chinese advantages regionally and globally”.