President Joe Biden and the leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed at Camp David on Friday to deepen military and economic ties, and made their strongest condemnation yet of “dangerous and aggressive behavior” by China in the South China Sea. The Biden administration held the summit with the leaders of the main U.S. allies in Asia, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in a bid to project unity in the face of China’s rise and nuclear threats from North Korea. The Associated Press has the story:
US, Japan & S Korea to expand Security and Economic ties
Newslooks- CAMP DAVID, Md. (AP)
President Joe Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea agreed Friday to expand security and economic ties at a historic summit at the U.S. presidential retreat of Camp David. Their meeting and their agreement come at a time that the three countries are on an increasingly tense ledge in their relations with China and North Korea.
Biden said the three countries would establish a hotline to discuss responses to threats and announced the agreements, including what they have termed the “Camp David Principles,” at the close of his talks with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“The purpose of our trilateral security cooperation is and will remain to promote and enhance peace and stability throughout the region,” they said in a joint statement.
The three leaders agreed to “improve our trilateral communication mechanism to facilitate regular and timely communication between our countries, including our national leadership,” the statement said. “That will include yearly trilateral meetings between leaders, foreign ministers, defense ministers, and national security advisors.”
President Joe Biden opened a historic summit with Japan and South Korea at Camp David on Friday focused on strengthening security and economic ties at a time of increasing concerns about North Korea’s persistent nuclear threats and China’s provocations in the Pacific.
“Our countries are stronger and the world will be safer as we stand together. And I know this is a belief that all three share,” Biden declared at the start of the meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the presidential retreat in Maryland.
Addressing his fellow leaders at what he called the first standalone summit of the three nations, the American president said, “I want to thank you both for your political courage that brought you here.”
Yoon said as the three appeared before reporters that “today will be remembered as a historic day, where we established a firm institutional basis and commitments to the trilateral partnership.”
And Kishida said before the private talks that “the fact that we, the three leaders, have got together in this way, I believe means that we are indeed making a new history as of today. The international community is at a turning point in history.”
According to the joint summit statement, the three countries committed to consult promptly with each other during crises and to coordinate responses to regional challenges, provocations and threats affecting common interests.
They also agreed to hold trilateral military training exercises annually and to share real-time information on North Korean missile launches by the end of 2023. The countries promised to hold trilateral summits annually.
The U.S., Japan and South Korea have agreed to a new security pledge committing the three countries to consult with each other in the event of a security crisis or threat in the Pacific. Details about the new “duty to consult” commitment emerged as the summit got underway.
Before the three-way talks, Biden met separately with Yoon and then Kishida in midmorning. The visitors’ remarks were translated into English as they spoke to reporters.
The agreement is one of several joint efforts that the leaders were expected to announce at the daylong summit.
“Suffice it to say, this is a big deal,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday shortly before the start of the summit. “It is a historic event, and it sets the conditions for a more peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and a stronger and more secure United States of America,”
But it was the language on China that stood out as stronger than expected, and which is likely to provoke a response from Beijing, which is a vital trading partner for both Korea and Japan.
“Regarding the dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims that we have recently witnessed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea, we strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.
Even before the summit began, it drew harsh public criticism from the Chinese government.
“The international community has its own judgment as to who is creating contradictions and increasing tensions,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters Friday.
“Attempts to form various exclusive groups and cliques and to bring bloc confrontation into the Asia-Pacific region are unpopular and will definitely spark vigilance and opposition in the countries of the region,” Wang said.
Sullivan pushed back against the Chinese concerns.
“It’s explicitly not a NATO for the Pacific,” Sullivan said. “This partnership is not against anyone, it is for something. It is for a vision of the Indo-Pacific that is free, open, secure and prosperous.”
The “duty to consult” pledge is intended to acknowledge that the three countries share “fundamentally interlinked security environments” and that a threat to one of the nations is “a threat to all,” according to a senior Biden administration official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the coming announcement.
Under the pledge, the three countries agree to consult, share information and align their messaging with each other in the face of a threat or crisis, the official said.
The summit is the first Biden has held during his presidency at the storied Camp David. The three leaders were scheduled to hold a news conference later. Biden was hoping to use much of the day with the two leaders as a more informal opportunity to tighten their bond.
The U.S. president planned to take Kishida and Yoon on a walk on the picturesque grounds and host them—and a few senior aides— for a lunch.
The retreat 65 miles (104.6 kilometers) from the White House was where President Jimmy Carter brought together Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in September 1978 for talks that established a framework for a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in March 1979. In the midst of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the retreat — then known as Shangri-La — to plan the Italian campaign that would knock Benito Mussolini out of the war.
Biden’s focus for the gathering is to nudge the United States’ two closest Asian allies to further tighten security and economic cooperation with each other. The historic rivals have been divided by differing views of World War II history and Japan’s colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
But under Kishida and Yoon, the two countries have begun a rapprochement as the two conservative leaders grapple with shared security challenges posed by North Korea and China. Both leaders have been upset by the stepped-up cadence of North Korea’s ballistic missile tests and Chinese military exercises near Taiwan, the self-ruled island that is claimed by Beijing as part of its territory, and other aggressive action.
Yoon proposed an initiative in March to resolve disputes stemming from compensation for wartime Korean forced laborers. He announced that South Korea would use its own funds to compensate Koreans enslaved by Japanese companies before the end of World War II.
Yoon also traveled to Tokyo that month for talks with Kishida, the first such visit by a South Korean president in more than 12 years. Kishida reciprocated with a visit to Seoul in May and expressed sympathy for the suffering of Korean forced laborers during Japan’s colonial rule,
The effort to sustain the trilateral relationship won’t be without challenges.
Beijing sees the tightening cooperation efforts as the first steps of a Pacific-version of NATO, the transatlantic military alliance, forming against it. U.S. officials expect that North Korea will lash out—perhaps with more ballistic missile test and certainly blistering rhetoric.
Polls show that a solid majority of South Koreans oppose Yoon’s handling of the forced labor issue that’s been central to mending relations with Japan. And many in Japan fear that bolstering security cooperation will lead the country into an economic Cold War with China, it’s biggest trading partner. Biden’s predecessor (and potential successor) Republican Donald Trump unnerved South Korea during his time in the White House with talk of reducing the U.S. military presence on the Peninsula.
“If an ultra-leftist South Korean president and an ultra-right wing Japanese leader are elected in their next cycles, or even if Trump or someone like him wins in the U.S., then any one of them could derail all the meaningful, hard work Biden, Yoon and Kishida are putting in right now,” said Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security ’s Indo-Pacific Security Program.
The three leaders are also expected to detail in their summit communique plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on progress the countries have made on sharing early-warning data on missile launches by North Korea.
Other announcements expected to come out of the summit include plans to expand military cooperation on ballistic defenses and to make the summit an annual event. Sullivan said the leaders would commit on Friday to a multiyear planning process for joint military exercises.
The leaders are also likely to discuss the long-running territorial conflicts in the disputed South China Sea involving China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.
The commitments at Biden’s first Camp David summit for foreign leaders represent a significant move for Seoul and Tokyo, which have a long history of mutual acrimony and distrust.
Kishida and Yoon, in jackets with no ties, walked side-by-side to shake hands with Biden before heading indoors.
“Our countries are stronger and the world would be safer as we stand together,” Biden said, praising the visiting leaders for their “political courage” in coming together.
Yoon cited former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as saying that freedom was not given but something that needed to be fought for and added: “Our three countries should be firmly united so that our freedom is not threatened or damaged.”
Kishida said the gathering showed the three countries were “making … (a) new history as of today.”
With Washington’s encouragement, Tokyo and Seoul are navigating their way past disputes dating to Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
Those disputes are among the reasons the leaders would not now consider a mutual-defense pact along the lines of what the United States has separately with both South Korea and Japan – who are not themselves formal allies – according to U.S. officials who declined to be identified while previewing the summit.
“What we have seen over the last couple of months is a breathtaking kind of diplomacy, that has been led by courageous leaders in both Japan and South Korea,” said Kurt Campbell, Biden’s coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs.
“They have sometimes gone against the advice of their own counselors and staff and taken steps that elevate the Japan-South Korea relationship into a new plane,” Campbell said.
