WASHINGTON — The leaders the United States, Japan and South Korea will announce today a new pledge that commits each nation to consult one another in the event of any crisis that may impact their respective security, according to senior Biden administration officials.
The pledge is just one commitment the White House anticipates will be made during what senior officials are characterizing as a historic meeting between Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
The trilateral summit at Camp David, the presidential retreat located in northern Maryland, comes after a series of bilateral meetings between Japan and South Korea, two nations that have had bitter history and tense diplomatic relations dating back to World War II. The foreign leaders arrived in the US last night and, in addition to a trilateral discussion, are also expected to meet with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and conduct individual bilateral meetings with Biden.
The senior administration officials said the pledge to consult is not intended to be an “alliance” or a “collective defense” treaty and also stressed it would not infringe on any of country’s right of self defense or separate, pre-existing bilateral commitments.
“The commitment to consult that will come out of [the] summit is really all of us taking our security and broader coordination to the next level in a really fundamental way,” the official said.
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the announcements will also include enhanced ballistic missile defense cooperation and joint military exercises.
Asked about whether this summit might provoke China into deepening its relationships with American adversaries, the officials insisted the summit is not about “isolating China,” but rather a “response to security steps and measures that we believe are antithetical to our interests.”
In addition to the pledge, the White House also expects to initiate new investments into a three-way hotline for quicker communication between the three leaders as well as their governments as a whole. Additionally, the three countries plan to commit to an annual trilateral summit, but the senior administration officials conceded those engagements may have to happen on the sidelines of other events, rather than be standalone meetings.
The countries are also expected to discuss cooperation in space as well as engagements in education, technology, diplomacy and defense, although the administration officials declined to go into more specific details on those topics ahead of the formal statements being released.
Whether the final announcements from the meeting will match the hype from the Biden administration remains to be seen. National Security Council officials earlier this week hailed the summit as historic, saying the three countries would be “a defining trilateral relationship for the 21st century.”
“What we have seen over the course of the last couple months is a breath-taking kind of diplomacy that has been led by courageous leaders in both Japan and South Korea,” Kurt Campbell, coordinator for the Indo-Pacific on the National Security Council, said during a Brookings Institute event on Wednesday. “What [South Korean] President Yoon [Suk Yeol] and [Japanese] Prime Minister [Fumio] Kishida have done has defied expectations. They have sometimes, against the advice of their own councilors and staff, taken steps that elevate the Japan-South Korean relationship into a new plane.”