Leaders of the United States, Japan and South Korea wrapped their Friday summit at the U.S. presidential retreat, Camp David, cementing a newly established trilateral partnership with a pledge for a unified trilateral response during a regional crisis, focusing on threats from China and North Korea.
“We’ve all committed to swiftly consult with each other in response to threats to any one of our countries from whatever source it occurs,” President Joe Biden said alongside South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a joint news conference at the summit’s conclusion.
“That means we’ll have a hotline to share information and coordinate our responses whenever there’s a crisis in the region, or affecting any one of our countries,” he added.
Without mentioning China, Biden said the leaders reaffirmed a commitment to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and address economic coercion — a practice Washington accuses Beijing of employing for its political goals.
“The free and open international order based on the rule of law is in crisis,” Kishida said, pointing the blame at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, continuing North Korean nuclear and missile threats and a “unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force in the East and South China seas.”
In a break from past summit language that normally avoids directly naming China, the leaders’ joint statement explicitly highlighted Beijing’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims” in the South China Sea.
China has claimed sovereignty over almost the entire sea, antagonizing competing claimants Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. An international tribunal ruled in 2016 that China’s claim was without legal foundation.
Just this week, news surfaced that Beijing appears to be constructing an airstrip on a disputed island in waters also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
Trilateral defense cooperation
The commitment to “consult during crisis” caps off a myriad of trilateral defense cooperation pledges, including regular military exercises and ballistic missile drills, as well as new collaborations on economic security — strengthening semiconductor supply chains, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, and new regional initiatives to build partner capacity throughout the Indo-Pacific, including in the maritime security domain.
The group also agreed to pilot a supply chain early-warning system to guard against disruptions of certain products, including critical minerals used in electric vehicle batteries. China dominates the value chain of these minerals, accounting for more than half of the world’s production of lithium, cobalt and manganese, and almost all rare earth minerals.
Beijing slammed the summit as Washington’s attempt to turn the Asia-Pacific into “a wrestling ground for geopolitical competition.”
“The Asia-Pacific region is a promising land for peace and stability and cooperation and development and should not become a dueling ground for geopolitical rivalry,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Friday.
As leaders geared up for Camp David, South Korea’s intelligence service said that North Korea was preparing more intercontinental ballistic missile tests in protest.
“Any provocations or attacks against any one of our three countries will trigger a decision-making process of this trilateral framework, and our solidarity will become even stronger and harder,” Yoon warned.
Not a mini-NATO
In a briefing to reporters Friday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan pushed back against Pyongyang’s and Beijing’s criticism of the summit as Washington’s gambit to create a “mini-NATO” in Asia.
“This partnership is not against anyone. It is for something,” he said. “It is for a vision of the Indo-Pacific that is free, open, secure and prosperous.”
Camp David marked a milestone in relations between South Korea and Japan, its former occupier. It followed months of diplomacy between the Yoon and Kishida governments, putting aside their fraught history and mutual distrust to deal with more imminent mutual security challenges.
Both Yoon and Kishida took pains to show intention to improve bilateral ties, addressing sensitive issues including compensation plans for Koreans who performed forced labor during Tokyo’s colonial rule and South Koreans’ protests against Japan’s plan to release treated radioactive water from the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.
While Beijing will dismiss Camp David as the illicit effort of a small clique with a Cold War mentality aiming to contain China, the summit marks “the decisive failure of Chinese efforts to use ROK-Japanese hostility, economic inducements and intimidation to weaken the United States’ northeast Asian alliances,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.
“The United States has used the summit to reassert, in concrete ways, that it is an active member of a vital region that China would like to have regarded as its sphere of influence,” he told VOA.
Beyond China and North Korea, Russia also opposes enhanced cooperation between the U.S. and its two main Asian allies. Restricted by Western sanctions, Moscow and Pyongyang have drawn closer since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
South Korea will need to face the burden of managing relations with China and Russia, said Wi Sung-lac, former South Korean ambassador to Russia and former South Korean representative to the six-party nuclear talks.
“They are regional powers that have a significant stake in promoting North Korea’s denuclearization, building peace on the Korean Peninsula, and achieving reunification of Korea,” he told VOA. “Seoul cannot ignore this reality.”
Future summits
The leaders committed that future leaders and their high-level officials would meet annually.
Administration officials said that the goal was “not just lock in Japan and South Korea, but lock in the United States, to make clear to everyone that we are here to stay in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Locking it in matters. There is concern that American pledges of cooperation could be undone should former U.S. President Donald Trump be reelected in 2024.
“There’s not much of anything I agree on with my predecessor on foreign policy,” Biden said. “His America First policy, walking away from the rest of the world has made us weaker, not stronger.”
Under his “America First” doctrine during his presidency, Trump withdrew the U.S. from various international treaties and regional engagements. The former president is also remembered for his mercurial relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom he once threatened with “fire and fury,” but later said he “fell in love” with.
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