Trump foresees a ‘big, fat hug’ from China’s Xi Jinping as New Delhi mulls a face-saver Quad meet-up without the US president in attendance
A stretch of awkward diplomacy is unfolding in the Indo-Pacific.
After India’s 2025 term as the Quad’s rotating chair ended without a leaders’ summit, New Delhi is planning to host a foreign ministers’ meeting that could be framed as a leaders-level discussion, even if the top leaders do not attend, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The move is seen as a way to ease India’s ruffled feathers on several counts.
“It’s akin to putting lipstick on a pig,” said Sourabh Gupta of the Institute for China-America Studies, a think tank in Washington.
“The outcomes in practice will not be worth the paper on which they are written,” he added, calling it “more farce than tragedy”.
, an informal strategic grouping that also includes Australia, Japan and the United States, was revived in 2017 during the first term of US President Donald Trump and has often been viewed as a counterweight to China’s growing influence in the region.
But amid tensions with New Delhi over a long-delayed potential trade deal, Trump has largely sidelined the grouping and
summit in India last year.
In addition, sources say it is unlikely that Trump will stop in India around his trip to China to meet President Xi Jinping on
.
Instead, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will attend the Quad meeting in New Delhi on his behalf next month. Currently, it is Australia’s turn to host the summit, but Canberra has deferred to New Delhi. This will be the first Quad engagement in India since 2023.
US
that the Trump administration convene a Quad summit before Trump’s meeting with Xi.
Experts say the optics are delicate. For India, hosting a leaders’ meeting without full participation would signal continuity in its Indo-Pacific role. But it also highlights the limits of its ability to anchor top-tier Quad diplomacy at a time of shifting US priorities.
Gupta said in diplomatic terms, this pretence of a leaders’ meeting is not a good look for the Quad, noting that the grouping is not doing anything “terribly majestic or magnificent”.
He contended that after the “disrespect” shown by Trump towards Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over Russian oil purchases, tensions with Pakistan, and disinterest in India’s chairpersonship of the Quad, India should have suspended the bloc’s leader-level framework and reverted back to its ministerial-led format.
Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, said that Rubio’s visit signals that Quad summits may be undergoing a “de-leaderization process”.
“This would be a blunt message from Washington on the perceived secondary role of the Quad in meeting the China challenge,” he said, noting that New Delhi does not have the same level of “allure” in Washington as it used to.
Lisa Curtis, who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for South and Central Asia during Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, argued that trying to label a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting as a leader-level meeting would “only draw attention to the fact that the leaders are, in fact, not present”.
“Playing such a game would only make the Quad look less credible in the eyes of other countries in the region,” said Curtis, who is now director of the Indo-Pacific Security Programme at the Centre for a New American Security.
The awkwardness is amplified by broader geopolitical recalibrations in Washington under Trump, who has signalled a more transactional approach to alliances and a warmer tone towards China and India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
After lauding Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, the de facto head of state, for his
at mediating US-Iran peace talks to try to end the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, Trump on Wednesday voiced anew his close ties with China’s leader Xi Jinping.
Talking about the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump ruled out that China was giving any weapons to Iran and said, “President Xi will give me a big, fat hug when I get there in a few weeks”.
With India uneasy with Pakistan’s return to the international spotlight, Indian media reported that New Delhi is also planning a
foreign ministers’ meeting in mid-May.
Alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the expanded Brics grouping also includes Iran and the United Arab Emirates – a Gulf state increasingly entangled in the hostilities involving the US, Israel and Iran.
Brics has not issued any statement on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.
Trump has been vocal about his distrust of Brics since he returned to the Oval Office and has threatened 100 per cent tariffs against the bloc if they try to
in trade. However, Brics members have been hit hard by the US-Israel war against Iran as the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global energy shipping, has squeezed supply and
.
Amid the crisis, the US has offered its own oil exports, even as it has pressured India to reduce its imports of Iranian and Russian energy.
A trade delegation from New Delhi is visiting Washington next week to resume talks on a
involving a framework announced in February.
During a speech in Washington on Wednesday, India’s chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran claimed the
– making supply chains less dependent on Beijing – was “back on track”, with New Delhi seeking trade agreements around the world, including with the US.
