Joe Biden scored a good diplomatic goal yesterday by getting the leaders of Japan and South Korea to put aside their mutual and old misgivings and unite in the common front promoted by Washington against Beijing in the military and economic fields. To underline the relevance of the "trilateral summit" between the three presidents and their foreign chiefs, the US president chose the Camp David residence –the scene of historic milestones in international relations– to receive the Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, and the South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
"If we stick together, our countries are stronger and the world is safer," Biden stressed at the beginning of the meeting held in the place where his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower received Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 and where Jimmy Carter sponsored the agreement. of peace between Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat in 1978. Yesterday was the first official meeting that Biden held at Camp David, and the first high-level meeting held there since 2015, when Barack Obama quoted to the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Biden's Asian priority was clear from the beginning of his term, when he had as his first guests at the White House, precisely, his counterparts from Tokyo and South Korea. But getting these two leaders to attend the US presidential residence in Maryland together, when they had never before met outside of multilateral summits, was still something of a feat.
The wounds caused by the Japanese occupation of Korea and by Tokyo's actions in World War II, recently reopened with visits by Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the country's soldiers who died at the front, including 14 war criminals, They haven't finished healing. That is why Biden praised the "political value" of his guests in making this new way of cooperation possible for three.
And it is that, in the eyes of the three interlocutors, the objective of stopping China is now imperative. And, although Washington highlighted the breadth of trilateral cooperation in areas that also include the economy, the main agreements that the three presidents signed aim at military prevention against any invasive temptation from Beijing in the area. What's more: the leaders denounced in writing the "dangerous and aggressive" behavior of Beijing in the South China Sea.
Accordingly, the three rulers established an early warning or hotline system to coordinate militarily in the event that any force – alluding to the Asian giant and North Korea – threatens any of the three countries or their key allies in the area. The principle is that "something that poses a threat to any of us poses a threat to all of us": a phrase reminiscent of NATO's Article 5 on mutual military assistance between allies, but which, as the White House remarked, "is not a formal commitment to collective defense, but to immediate communication and consultation" between the three partners in the event of a contingency or regional threat, basically in the Indo-Pacific, and "without violating anyone's right to defense under international law or treaties current bilateral agreements.
The pacts of this first trilateral, which its interlocutors want to support with annual meetings, include progress in the exchange of missile alert data, an improved program of joint military exercises and new economic and energy security initiatives, including coordination in the event of ruptures in the supply chain.
Beijing reacted as expected: "China opposes countries that form cliques, exacerbate confrontation and endanger the security of other countries," a foreign spokesman said. The tension continues to rise.
