In the nine months since then, all three countries have sought to deepen cooperation, particularly in economic security, intelligence sharing and defense policy. Where once the United States relied on bilateral relationships with South Korea and Japan — two of its closest allies — now there is a regular schedule of trilateral sit-downs and exchanges. The three militaries are even conducting exercises together, including their first-ever combined aerial exercise last October and their biggest-ever combined naval exercises in January. More recently, in early April, the three navies held two days of joint drills in the East China Sea, where China has been pressing its aggressive territorial claims.
Over lunch at his official residence in Tokyo, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, one of the biggest boosters of the trilateral relationship, told us: “One of China’s principal regional objectives is that the United States, Japan and Korea are never in strategic alignment. China’s tactics are to isolate each country and use their coercive tools to bend them to their will. President Biden at Camp David flipped the script. He fundamentally shifted the landscape in favor of the three democracies and their collective interest. Ever since, China has been playing catch up.”
A sign of how eager China is to regain diplomatic momentum can be found in the summit in Seoul on Monday between leaders of South Korea, Japan and China — the first such high-level meeting since 2019. China’s desire to meet is seen as a ploy to interject itself into the close Japanese-South Korean alignment with Washington. In the past, such gatherings highlighted the joint Sino-South Korean suspicion of Japan. Now, the meeting highlights the joint Japanese-South Korean suspicion of China — which, with its bullying tactics, has become deeply unpopular in both countries.
China is part of another triangular relationship of its own — with Russia and North Korea — that has only grown deeper since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With North Korea providing munitions to Russia for use in Ukraine, and Russia and China shielding North Korea from any accountability at the United Nations, alarms are growing in both Seoul and Tokyo about the threats they face from this alignment (if still short of an alliance) of illiberal states. The concern is all the greater amid fears that Russia will help North Korea to expand and improve its nuclear arsenal.
A pro-American trilateral alignment is the best possible answer to the menace posed by the anti-American trilateral alignment of China, Russia and North Korea. But, because the Japanese-South Korean-U.S. relationship is so recent, it might be imperiled by changes of leadership in those countries. Although it has little to do with the trilateral relationship, Biden, Yoon and Kishida are all unpopular.
Kishida’s approval rating in Japan just edged up in a new poll — to a meager 18.7 percent. Yoon’s approval rating, at 30.3 percent, is better but still dire, and his conservative People Power Party was just defeated in National Assembly elections by a liberal opposition party that is more suspicious of Japan. But at least Yoon has three more years left in office, and Kishida is likely to stay as prime minister by winning the support of his Liberal Democratic Party in September. Biden is in more immediate danger of ouster: His approval rating is just 38.7 percent, and he is lagging behind former president Donald Trump in most of the key swing states.
A Trump return to the White House would be a serious setback for the United States’ system of alliances — and the trilateral relationship is no exception. Trump likely would be averse to the trilateral relationship simply because it was negotiated by his opponent. He certainly wouldn’t expend diplomatic capital to keep it alive.
Moreover, Trump is obsessed with the cost of defending South Korea without considering all of the benefits that accrue from a close relationship with the world’s 13th-largest economy — and a stalwart liberal democracy. As president, Trump demanded that South Korea increase its subsidies for the U.S. troop presence to more than $1 billion a year, but he still isn’t satisfied. Sounding a refrain he has echoed consistently since at least 1990, Trump told Time magazine in April, “I want South Korea to treat us properly. … They’ve become a very wealthy country. We’ve essentially paid for much of their military, free of charge.”
It doesn’t seem to matter to Trump that South Korea spends 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product on its defense — higher than the NATO target — and has one of the most capable militaries on the planet. Trump previously suspended joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises; in the future, he is unlikely to fund trilateral exercises.
If he is shrewd, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could take advantage of another Trump term by slightly sweetening the offer he made at their 2019 summit in Hanoi, where Kim demanded the lifting of all major sanctions in return for the closure of only the Yongbyon nuclear facility. (The U.S. government believes that North Korea has at least two additional enrichment plants.) Trump rejected that gambit, because he was surrounded by hawks such as then-national security adviser John Bolton, but Bolton, who now calls Trump “unfit” to be president, surely wouldn’t be found in another Trump administration.
Left to his own desires, Trump could decide to make a deal with Kim even at the cost of pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea. Or he could go in an entirely different direction and resurrect threats of “fire and fury” against North Korea if Kim stages fresh provocations. Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.
Little wonder that, during a recent trip to both Japan and South Korea, we found considerable anxiety in both countries about the prospect of another Trump term. The nervousness is particularly palpable in South Korea because Japan had more success in managing Trump when Shinzo Abe was prime minister. (Abe was assassinated in 2022, two years after leaving office.)
The Biden administration is now in the midst of talks with South Korea on a new cost-sharing agreement for U.S. forces in the hope of reaching a deal before Trump can return to office. Japan, the United States and South Korea are also seeking to deepen and institutionalize their mutual cooperation so that it can survive changes of government in any of the three countries. Emanuel told us there had been more than 50 trilateral engagements since the Camp David summit nine months ago.
Yet the three countries still have much to do to increase real-time intelligence sharing, link together missile defense systems, expand cooperation on defense industrial production and take other steps to make the trilateral relationship a permanent part of the security architecture of East Asia. “We need to put down roots … into the system,” Emanuel told the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul. “It requires constant investment.”
All three current leaders — Biden, Yoon and Kishida — have made that investment. Their successors might not do so, and thus could fritter away this significant diplomatic achievement. All three leaders would do well to act urgently right now to lock in the trilateral progress.
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