The United States, South Korea and Japan will forge closer security ties on Friday at an unprecedented summit near Washington intended to send a signal of unity to China, but also to North Korea .
According to the South Korean agency Yonhap, Pyongyang could launch a ballistic missile during the meeting, just to remember the good memories of the three leaders.
To receive Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Joe Biden chose Camp David, the country residence of American presidents whose name is historically linked to peace negotiations on the Middle East.
This “shows, in a deeply symbolic way, the importance that we attach to this major event”, commented Wednesday Kurt Campbell, principal adviser Asia of the American president, during a round table organized by the center of reflections Brookings.
He lifted the veil on two announcements expected at this summit, the first of its kind after several meetings of the three leaders on the sidelines of major international meetings.
The United States, Japan and South Korea will on the one hand commit to holding such a meeting every year.
The three countries will also set up an “emergency communication channel between the heads of state and government and other personalities of their administrations”.
A sort of “red phone” with three handsets, therefore, in a region which lives under the threat of the North Korean nuclear program and which fears an invasion of Taiwan by China.
“We created exactly what China didn’t want,” said US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel during the roundtable on Wednesday.
The summit, he said, must send the message that “we have to bet on America” ??in the region.
“We are a rising power, they (the Chinese, editor’s note) are declining,” he said, echoing a now familiar rhetoric from Joe Biden, who regularly highlights China’s economic and demographic problems.
Beijing does not hide its hostility to this new three-way dialogue — which adds to other diplomatic initiatives relaunched or created by the Biden administration in Asia-Pacific, with India and Australia.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, for example, recently warned Seoul and Tokyo: “You can blond your hair or thin your nose as much as you want, you will never be Europeans or Westerners, you cannot become Westerners. . We need to know where our roots are.”
He called on China, South Korea and Japan to “work together”.
Washington is instead betting that Japan and South Korea are ready to turn to the West, which means overcoming a painful past: that of the brutal colonization of the Korean peninsula by the Japanese between 1910 and 1945.
The White House is well aware that the rapprochement is not unanimous in public opinion, whether Korean or Japanese, despite common strategic interests.
“It is not enough structural movements to bring about a rapprochement, it took the coming to power of two leaders”, Fumio Kishida and Yoon Suk Yeol, commented Mira Rapp-Hooper, another adviser to the American president.
Washington obviously also boasts of the interpersonal skills of Joe Biden, who has taken particular care of his relationship with Japan as well as with South Korea.
While celebrating the “historic” nature of Friday’s summit, the US executive knows that this trilateral relationship remains fragile.
Yoon Suk Yeol, for example, ends his term in 2027 and cannot be re-elected.
The Camp David commitments must, according to Rahm Emanuel, ensure that this dialogue “become the norm and is integrated into the DNA of all the institutions” of the three countries, beyond the sole goodwill of their current leaders.
08/18/2023 08:32:27 – Camp David (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
