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President Joe Biden welcomed the leaders of Japan and South Korea to a summit at Camp David on Friday, saying closer security co-operation between the three countries would “make the world safer”.
Biden, speaking at the start of the first gathering of foreign leaders at the presidential retreat since 2015, said he had been seeking closer ties between the two American allies for decades. The three leaders are due to sign a pact that would increase collaboration in military exercises, cyber security and intelligence sharing.
“Strengthening the ties between our democracies has long been a priority for me,” Biden said. “You stepped up to do the hard work — I would argue historic work — to forge a foundation from which we can face the future together.”
The US has bilateral defence treaties with Tokyo and Seoul, but has for decades struggled to convince its two allies to work more closely on regional security arrangements. US officials believe Friday’s summit will mark a turning point in relations between Japan and South Korea.
The Biden administration has worked for more than a year to persuade the two countries to move beyond bitter tensions over Japan’s wartime behaviour and co-operate more closely in areas including military exercises, cyber security and intelligence sharing.
The decision to attend the summit and sign up to an agreement that binds the rivals poses political challenges at home for South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida. Analysts credit both leaders for taking what is regarded as a bold step that many of their predecessors were unwilling to broach.
They agreed to the summit amid growing regional concern about China’s rapid military modernisation. Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, insisted the arrangement was not aimed at any one rival but was designed to enhance security in the Indo-Pacific region more broadly.
“China’s entire strategy is based on the premise that America and its number one and number two ally in the region can’t get together and get on the same page. That’s fundamentally going to be different,” Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, said this week.
Patricia Kim, an Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, said the “striking progress” on bilateral and trilateral co-operation would not have been possible without the rising threat posed by Beijing and Pyongyang.
Kim said that “a heightened sense of insecurity” around China and North Korea was coupled with “renewed fears” of a disintegrating international security environment triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She also credited “incredible political will in all three capitals — particularly in Seoul”.
Michael Green, a former top White House Asia official who heads the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said the summit was Biden’s “most important power play in Asia” since the 2021 Aukus deal to help Australia obtain submarines.
“From an historical perspective, it is arguably much bigger than Aukus because nobody doubted that the US, UK and Australia could work together,” Green said. “There was doubt . . . about whether Japan and Korea could align strategically.”
While the three countries have hailed the agreement as historic, one of the critical questions is whether their future leaders will continue in the same direction. Officials in Asia are particularly concerned about what will happen to US policy with regards to its alliances if Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025.
US officials have stressed that they are trying to create institutional structures that will be hard to unwind.
