Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, attend a joint press conference following the Quad Foreign Ministers' Meeting in New Delhi on May 26, 2026
| Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
The Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting ended on Tuesday (May 26, 2026) without any clarity on when the next Quad Summit, which was due to be held in India, will be scheduled. This sparked speculation that the Quad may now revert to a Ministerial dialogue, as it was before it was upgraded in 2021.Previous Quad joint statements have always identified the country that would host the next leaders’ Summit. However the statement issued after the meeting between External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio only referred to them “looking forward to the next Summit”.Quad Foreign Ministers meet updatesPushed to the sidelinesWhile the four FMs did not address the press directly after the meeting, as has been the convention, the Ministry of External Affairs, the Australian Minister, and the Japanese Foreign Ministry each held separate briefings during the day, refuting questions on whether the Quad had lost some of its importance and whether leaders of the grouping were now engaging more with other multilateral formations. Sources said that Australia will now host the next Foreign Ministers meeting, as India will hand over the chair of the grouping, and the Summit could now be held at on the sidelines of other multilateral meetings where all four leaders may be present later this year, such as the UN General Assembly or G-20 Summit in the US in December. While US President Donald Trump and Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi will be at the G-7 in France in June, and PM Narendra Modi is a special invitee, Australian PM Anthony Albanese has not been invited. Scheduling woes“The leaders’ schedules always are very difficult to pin down,” MEA joint secretary for the Americas (AMS) K. Nagaraj Naidu explained at a briefing about the meeting. He responded to a number of questions on the issue, but gave no indication of whether there was still a chance that the Summit, that was due to be held in India in 2024, and then in 2025, could now be hosted in 2026. “Obviously, that depends on the availability of leaders, but we look forward to [the Summit],” Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong told a group of journalists. “In the meantime, three Foreign Ministers’ Quad meetings in a very short space of time demonstrates the commitment of all countries to it,” she added, referring to meetings of the Quad FMM in January and July 2025 prior to the meeting on Tuesday. When asked by The Hindu if the lack of a Summit-level Quad meet indicates a downgrade of the grouping, Ms. Wong said she would “take offence to suggesting that anything held in Australia is a downgrade”.Doubts about U.S. commitmentJapanese official spokesperson Toshihiro Kitamura also gave a non-committal reply, but denied that the U.S. under Mr. Trump was slowing down Quad engagement due to his closer relationship with China, and his plans to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24. “The day [for Quad Summit] is not decided yet,” Mr. Kitamura told journalists, acknowledging that he sensed some “scepticism” in India about the U.S. engagement with the Quad. “However, I would like to emphasise that as we have observed, the U.S. commitment is still standing,” he said.While Mr. Rubio and U.S. officials left India directly after the Quad meeting on Tuesday morning and held no briefing in Delhi, the U.S. Secretary of State has consistently countered questions about the U.S.’s commitment to the Quad, given that Mr. Trump has not recently referred to the grouping that was restarted in 2017, during his own first presidential tenure. Mr. Rubio said that he had held a meeting of Quad Ministers almost immediately after being sworn in in January 2025, and convened another in Washington in July 2025.Echoing the sentiment, Ms. Wong said that given recent developments, the U.S. President is “very deeply engaged at the moment” on West Asia, adding that there had been more FM-level Quad meetings in the past year than any other time. Published - May 26, 2026 09:14 pm IST
