Anthony Blinken meets his counterparts from Australia, India and Japan after friction with China | USA | Quad | the world

US Secretary of State, Anthony BlinkenHe will meet his counterparts in India, Japan and Australia next week, following escalating tensions with China, a senior official said on Friday.

Blinken will negotiate with the call “Quad“On the sidelines of a 20-member panel meeting in New Delhi on March 3, he said. Donald LuSouth Asia’s top foreign affairs official.

The four diplomatic chiefs will hold a one-hour public debate Raisina DialogueA major Indian conference on geopolitics, he said.

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The so-called “Quad” was a concept coined by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe While seeking unity among the four democracies that experienced a friction China Increasingly, the group has repeatedly denounced it as a movement created to geopolitically surround it.

The meeting comes weeks after Blinken canceled a trip to Beijing after a Chinese spy balloon flew over the US. and shot down by the US military. Washington said it carried out the spying, but China He noted that this was for meteorological purposes.

He then had a tense meeting with China’s foreign policy chief Wang Yi at a defense conference in Munich, Germany.

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“Quad is not a military alliance; “Quad is not really an organization against a country or group of countries,” Lu said.

India has long had tensions with China, including a major border conflict in 2020, and has a new alliance with the US.

But New Delhi has defied Washington by preserving its Cold War relationship with Russia despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago.