By Kirsty Needham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong met her Indian and Japanese counterparts in Washington and said the invitation for Quad foreign ministers to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration showed an “iron-clad commitment” to close cooperation in the Indo Pacific region.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio appears on track for confirmation as Trump’s secretary of state on Monday, clearing the way for a meeting of Quad foreign ministers the following day, people familiar with the matter previously said.
The grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. was formed amid shared concerns about China’s growing power.
“It’s a demonstration of the collective commitment of all countries to the Quad, an iron-clad commitment in this time where close cooperation in the Indo-Pacific is so important,” Wong said on Sunday of the foreign ministers’ invitation to Washington.
Wong said she would also meet Rubio and other members of the Trump administration, adding the U.S. alliance was critical to Australia’s defence and economic prosperity.
Wong is expected to discuss the AUKUS defence technology partnership with the U.S. and Britain, a decades-long plan to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.
She told reporters in Washington that Australia was “on a pathway of increasing defence expenditure”.
“Our focus is very much on how do we continue to deliver on AUKUS, because we do believe that capability is so important for deterrence, which is the way in which you can secure peace,” she said.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said in a radio interview on Monday that AUKUS would see Australia make a significant funding contribution to the American industrial base to speed up U.S. production rates of Virginia class submarines.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham, Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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