The Quad (US, Japan, Australia and India) held a meeting in New Delhi.
New Delhi:
As Asia’s “Quad” powers search for ways to define the group, Japan’s foreign minister has offered a model – The Beatles.
Yoshimasa Hayashi, an avid music fan, drew a parallel to the Fab Four on Friday when he met his Quad counterparts from the United States, Australia and India in New Delhi.
Hayashi said, “It’s a band like The Beatles. The members are fixed and they’ve always (for more than 10 years) played together.”
“But it’s more of a soft group type, so that even within The Beatles, Paul McCartney could release solo albums.”
Hayashi, an accomplished pianist himself, impressed his group of seven counterparts with an impromptu performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine” when they met in the band’s hometown of Liverpool in 2021.
The Quad was led by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a coalition of democracies, which China has described as an attempt to contain it.
Its members deny hostile intentions and stress that they are not a military alliance, instead cooperating in areas such as vaccine production and disaster relief.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – himself a guitarist who has released his own songs inspired by classic rock – made a similar point to Hayashi, if less musically.
“We really see this as transformational geometry,” he said.
“There are different collections of countries – some informal alliances, some loose partnerships, some working together on a bilateral basis, some in slightly larger groups,” he said.
“The idea is to really make sure that we are fit for purpose for a particular challenge.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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