New York, June 27 (IANS) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will attend a meeting of the Quad foreign ministers in Washington next week ahead of the summit India is scheduled to host this year, according to the State Department.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host the meeting that will include Foreign Ministers Penny Wong of Australia and Iwaya Takeshi of Japan next Tuesday in Washington, Principal Deputy Spokesperson Thomas Pigott said on Thursday.

He noted that Rubio’s first diplomatic engagement after he took office on January 21 was the Quad foreign ministers meeting, which took place a day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Next week’s meeting “builds on that momentum to advance a free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific”, Pigott said.

“This is what American leadership looks like: strength, peace, and prosperity”, he said.

Jaishankar posted on X that he had a phone conversation with Wong on Thursday in preparation for the Quad meeting.

The Quad meeting will be the first time the ministers get together after the Pahalgam attack.

Before he goes to Washington, Jaishankar will inaugurate on Monday an exhibition at the United Nations on “The Human Cost of Terrorism”.

India’s UN Mission said it will “highlight the devastating toll of heinous terrorist acts around the world”.

It will come a day before Pakistan takes over the rotating presidency of the Security Council.

Next week’s Quad meeting is expected to lay the groundwork for the Summit to be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi which will bring US President Donald Trump, and Prime Ministers Anthony Albanese of Australia and Shigeru Ishiba of Japan to India.

At their meeting in February, PM Modi said he looked forward to hosting Trump at the summit.

As the first foreign affairs meeting after Trump’s inauguration, it showed his administration’s regional priority as China’s threat loomed.

However, the world’s attention turned to the Middle East and Ukraine.

The conflict between Israel and Iran appears to have ebbed for now, freeing some bandwidth to turn attention to the Indo-Pacific, where China poses a challenge to the nations of the region.

–IANS

al/rs