President Joe Biden met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at Camp David on Friday for trilateral security talks amid heightened tensions in the Indo-Pacific.
The three countries announced that they would commit to conducting annual military exercises, sharing intelligence, and holding new annual trilateral summits. However, no three-way collective defense agreement was reached, CNN reported.
“We share concerns about actions inconsistent with the rules-based international order, which undermine regional peace and prosperity. Recalling the publicly announced position of each of our countries regarding the dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims that we have recently witnessed by the People’s Republic of China … in the South China Sea, we strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific,” the three countries said in a joint statement.
The statement went on to call out North Korea over its nuclear program and saber rattling and Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
“We reaffirm our commitment to stand with Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked and brutal war of aggression that has shaken the foundation of the international order. We commit to continue providing assistance to Ukraine, imposing coordinated, robust sanctions on Russia, and accelerating the reduction of dependency on Russian energy,” reads the joint statement.
Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, said that the three countries needed to establish ties so deep that subsequent administrations could not undo them, as he explained on PBS News Hour.
“So the goal here is to make sure that it’s so wedded and so embedded, where you’re spending time, you’re spending money, you’re spending resources, that it becomes the new norm. … That’s why all three leaders are determined to literally get this woven into the kind of grain of the wood of the institutions, whether that’s on the military side, the intelligence side, the defense side, the training side, the economic security side, the supply chain side,” Emanuel said.
However, the summit’s goals were not without opposition from within the two Asian nations. By strengthening military ties with the United States and Japan, Yoon opened himself up to domestic criticism that he is increasing the risk of a new war with North Korea, according to The New York Times.
There are elements of Washington’s vision for an alliance that Japan also found troubling. So far, Japan has been unwilling to join the nuclear strategic cooperation agreement recently entered into by the United States and South Korea.
China is also weary of how a renewed pact might impact its interests, and will likely engage in its own diplomatic outreach to its Asian neighbors once their leaders return from Camp David, per the NYT.
But, as Wu Xinbo, dean of international studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, warned in comments to the NYT, if South Korea and Japan appear to be taking “substantive actions that are unfavorable to China,” Beijing may have a “relatively tough response.”
China is the largest trading partner to both nations, so consideration that China might retaliate has been a matter of pragmatism.
“No matter how yellow you dye your hair, or how sharp you make your nose, you’ll never turn into a European or American, you’ll never turn into a Westerner,” said Wang Yi, a senior Chinese diplomat in July, the NYT reported.