The president of the United States, Joe Biden, reached an agreement of a military and economic nature with Japan and South Korea on Friday that, without constituting a NATO in the Pacific, represents an important step to consolidate an alliance against the Chinese and North Korean threat in the region. Biden met Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his Korean counterpart Yoon Suk Yeol for the first time at Camp David to ratify a security commitment that will lead the three countries to consult each other in the event of a security crisis or threat in the Pacific, according to Biden administration officials.
The obligation to share information in any crisis situation is intended to recognize that the three countries share “fundamentally interrelated security environments” and that a threat to one of the nations is “a threat to all,” according to the same sources cited by the AP agency.
This is an agreement that seemed unfeasible before the war broke out in Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin’s order to invade the neighboring country in February 2022 completely altered the international diplomatic chessboard, giving China wings to threaten Taiwanese sovereignty and sparking fears in the US and Europe about a possible entente between China, Russia and South Korea. North, all of them nuclear powers.
The agreement between the US, Japan and South Korea now makes more sense than ever in the event that this “neo Cold War” scenario, as Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has described it, worsens over time, and more with the constant threat of nuclear tests from Pyongyang. Hence Biden’s satisfaction after scoring the goal of a similar agreement.
“Strengthening the ties between our democracies has long been a priority for me, since I was Vice President of the United States,” the Democrat told both Asian leaders in a pre-meeting session. “That is because our countries and the world would be safer” to maintain the agreement that they have just ratified, thanking the “political courage” that has led them to accept the meeting in Washington after decades of enmity and confrontations between the two Asian nations.
In the background, the three and a half decades of Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula – from 1910 to 1945 – that have marked relations between Tokyo and Seoul in recent decades. Biden has not hesitated to take advantage of the turn that the Korean leader seems to have taken to bury old quarrels and seek an alliance against the growing Chinese dominance in the region. Both Yoon and Kishida agreed that this is a historic meeting for the three nations. “This means that we are actually writing a new story today,” said the Japanese president.
The Chinese reaction did not wait. Even before the meeting in Washington began, Beijing ruled on an agreement that it considers “unpopular and will definitely arouse vigilance and opposition in the countries of the region”, in the words of the Chinese foreign spokesman, Wang Wenbin. “The international community has its own judgment on who is creating contradictions and raising tensions,” he added. However, Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, was quick to clarify that this is not “explicitly a Pacific NATO” or “nobody” deal in particular.
It is no coincidence that Biden has opted for Camp David for this three-way meeting. In that vacation complex, traditionally reserved for the weekends of the president of the United States and his family, summits of a historic nature have been held in the past. Winston Churchill was the first guest in 1943, when the White House was the domain of Franklin D. Roosevelt. They went fishing together in one of the nearby rivers. Years later, in 1978, Jimmy Carter would achieve a historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel after two weeks of negotiations – known as the Camp David accords – and Bill Clinton unsuccessfully attempted something similar with the leaders of Israel and Palestine at the time. , Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.
Roosevelt turned it into his personal “Shangri-La,” a spiritual retreat modeled after his winter residence in Warm Springs, Georgia, renamed after his grandson, David. The last time it was used to receive a foreign leader was eight years ago, when Barack Obama was president. Now Biden wants to recover a tradition that could give him promising results for the future in the face of the threat from the Chinese giant.