Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s president, left, and Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, shake hands ahead of a summit meeting at the prime minister’s official residence on March 16, 2023 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Kiyoshi Ota – Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — As the leaders of Japan and South Korea prepare to join President Joe Biden at Camp David later this week, several high-level American government officials are setting high expectations for the summit, dubbing the three countries’ future as “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,” said Kurt Campbell, coordinator for the Indo-Pacific on the National Security Council. “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.”
The meeting is significant, given the bitter history and tense diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea that dates back to World War II. That Biden is hosting them at Camp David — Campbell noted Biden has hosted few foreign dignitaries at the presidential retreat — seems to be part of the White House’s signal that the president views this relationship as vital to American interests.
“I think we all understand the significance when a meeting is held there. It’s meant to signal with deep symbolism the importance that we attach to this momentous moment,” Campbell said during a Brookings Institute event on Wednesday.
Campbell and Mira Rapp-Hooper, senior advisor for East Asia and Oceania on the NSC, said the White House plans to announce new engagements between the three countries on issues concerning security, technology and education.
“We will announce a number of things [including a] trilateral annual summit between the three leaders which we intend to abide by, a national security and secretary of state effort that will help prepare the way for that,” Campbell said. “We’re going to invest in technology to have a three-way hotline for the leaders and others inside their governments to communicate.”
It is also expected that cooperation in space will be on the table, although how much of that cooperation will be focused in the national security realm is unclear.
Hooper nodded to a previous joint statement issued in November, when the two foreign heads of state were in Cambodia and made a commitment to share early missile warning data.
“And one of the things we’ll be able to report out on Friday is that we’re well on our way to being able to do that, as well as make progress in a number of other information sharing areas that allow us to pull data and information to better understand the picture that we are facing,” she said.
Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, summed up the coming meeting as a “fundamental advancement of America’s interests.”
