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On Friday there was the first official trilateral meeting of the leaders of the United States, South Korea and Japan in history: it took place at Camp David, in Maryland, one of the US president’s summer residences, where Joe Biden invited the South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to strengthen the strategic cooperation between the three countries. In the press conference at the end of the meeting, Biden said that he, Yoon and Kishida had agreed to hold joint military exercises every year and to hold trilateral meetings “not just this year, not just next year, forever.”
The meeting at Camp David was very important for the United States, which would like to strengthen its alliance with the two Asian countries to counter China’s influence in the region bordering the western Pacific Ocean, and for this reason they would like relations between Korea of the South and Japan were more expansive. In fact, although both countries are very close allies of the United States, aligned on the most important strategic issues, they have a rather distant, distrustful and often hostile relationship with each other, above all due to the crimes committed by Japan during the occupation of the Korean peninsula which lasted until end of the Second World War, which has been talked about since 2018.
Biden praised the “political courage” of Kishida and Yoon to overcome tensions between their countries to work for a new alliance; Yoon in particular has been heavily criticized in his country for his efforts to ease relations with Japan. Responding to a question about the origin of tensions in relations with South Korea, Kishida repeated several times that he wanted to “look ahead”: Japan would like South Korea to collaborate both in the economic and defense fields – both countries are exposed to possible aggression from North Korea, whose practice-launched missiles often arrive close to Japan – putting aside the problems related to the past Japanese occupation.
Both Biden and his guests, answering journalists’ questions, stressed that the trilateral meeting “was not about China”, with which both Japan and South Korea have very important commercial relations. In China, however, the trilateral meeting was not well received and some newspapers have defined it as an attempt to create a military alliance similar to NATO in Asia.
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