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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Biden brings South Korea and Japan together
Nestled in the woods of Maryland outside Washington, DC, the Camp David estate -- the president's country retreat -- looms large in international diplomacy as a place where serious business gets done.
On Friday, President Joe Biden will host South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for a summit at the famous campsite where, in 1978, Jimmy Carter helped broker peace between Egypt and Israel.
While it might not seem like a big deal for Washington to facilitate a summit with America’s two closest Asian partners, it is monumental that South Korea, in particular, appears ready and willing to enlist in a new US-led trilateral alliance with Japan.
Despite a rapprochement, relations between the two East Asian giants have remained strained since Japan ended its 35-year occupation of the Korean peninsula in 1945.
So, what’s on the agenda at Camp David and why is South Korea, long aggrieved by its former colonial power, willing to create this bloc?
The three states will reportedly announce publicly that they will respond collectively to security threats in the Asia Pacific – a big deal considering that Seoul and Tokyo do not have an official security alliance. Trilateral military drills will likely be annualized, while they’ll also announce closer coordination on ballistic-missile defense and cybersecurity.
Clearly, the summit aims to send a powerful message to China and North Korea that these three advanced economies are prepared to combine their military and tech bonafides to protect their collective interests.
Why is this happening now?
Changing of the guard in Seoul. Only two years ago, such a meeting would have seemed nearly unthinkable. Yoon’s predecessor, President Moon Jae-in, broadly seen as left of center, went to painstaking lengths to engage with Pyongyang.
He also oversaw a period of worsening ties with Tokyo over compensation for Japan’s use of Korean forced labor during the occupation. Relations reached a nadir in 2019 when Tokyo placed restrictions on exports bound for South Korea needed to make crucial tech.
But this approach to regional politics took a sharp turn when Yoon, a conservative, came to power in March 2022, vowing to get tougher on China and the North, and to bolster ties with the US. And that’s exactly what he’s done.
But how much of this shift reflects Yoon’s hawkish brand of politics -- or is this a symptom of a broader anti-China shift in Korean society?
“Trilateral cooperation, and the bilateral rapprochement with Japan that have enabled it, would have been unthinkable under former president Moon or Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the center-left opposition whom Yoon narrowly defeated in 2022,” says Jeremy Chan, a China and Northeast Asia consultant at Eurasia Group.
“The big right-left divide in Korean politics is about policy towards North Korea, and the conservatives take a far more hawkish line toward Pyongyang and their backers in Beijing,” he says.
The China angle. China’s increasingly bellicose behavior in the South China Sea has indeed helped the US bring Japan and South Korea together under a joint security umbrella. After all, nothing unites a former colonial power and former colonial subject like mutual fears of a regional superpower.
Crucially, increasingly negative attitudes towards Beijing at home have also given Yoon an opening to deepen security ties with Japan and the US.
Indeed, South Koreans have soured on China since 2016, when Beijing enforced punitive economic measures on Seoul after the US deployed THAAD anti-missile systems on the Korean Peninsula. The US’ aim was to offer a bulwark against Pyongyang’s missile activities, but China said the move constituted a threat to its national security.
Still, it’s a balancing act, as Japan and South Korea’s economies are tightly interwoven with China’s, and neither wants to risk alienating Beijing too much.
What Washington wants. Getting Tokyo and Seoul to act in lockstep has been a key foreign policy priority for the Biden administration as it looks to contain China’s growth. Together, the two Asian states host 80,000 US troops, and South Korea also hosts the largest US overseas military base in the world.
Politically, the bringing together of Japan and Korea can certainly be cast as a win for President Joe Biden, who has aptly capitalized on growing fear in the region to unite two important US allies with a contentious past.
China’s fear: Asian NATO. “China is watching for how far trilateral cooperation moves forward after the summit, particularly in terms of defense and security,” Chan says, adding that, “Beijing’s greatest fear is the emergence of a trilateral military alliance akin to an Asian NATO on its border.”
What’s more, Beijing will be looking to see whether there are any new agreements on tech that might give an indication, Chan says, of just “how far each country is willing to go in moving away from China economically.”
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South Korea's nuclear pickle
The US and South Korea on Wednesday agreed to deploy American nuclear-armed submarines in South Korean waters for the first time in more than 40 years. Both governments framed the deal as “extended deterrence” from the US security umbrella against a North Korean nuclear attack.
As part of the agreement, Seoul committed to maintaining its non-nuclear status. But will it be enough to stop South Korea from flirting with the idea of developing homegrown atomic weapons?
In recent months, the once-fringe idea of Seoul getting the bomb has exploded into the mainstream conversation. President Yoon Suk Yeol has publicly raised the possibility, and media pundits are talking about it 24/7. What's more, almost three-quarters of South Koreans are in favor (although they worry equally about countering Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un pushing the red button).
To understand why South Korea is considering getting its own nukes, picture this doomsday scenario: North Korea suddenly attacks South Korea, pushing the US to intervene. But then Kim threatens to nuke a mainland US city, which he can now reach with his newest ICBMs.
Would Washington go to bat for Seoul? And perhaps more importantly, would it do so before it's too late because it’s distracted by messy US domestic politics or another crisis like China invading Taiwan?
Most South Koreans don't want to take that chance. After all, the country's literal existence is on the line — even more so after Russia’s nuclear threats in Ukraine have awakened long-dormant fears of nuclear war.
Ukraine “has made the anxiety real,” says Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and director of its 38 North Program. “Prior to that, I think we'd all gotten really comfortable with the notion that nuclear weapons would actually never be used again.”
But in her view, going nuclear comes with immense risks that far outweigh the benefits. For starters, nuclear parity doesn’t make anyone safer.
“What we see in South Asia [with India and Pakistan] is exactly the opposite,” Town explains. "It doesn't stop the provocations. It doesn't stop the adventurism. If anything ... they're both sort of still kind of egging each other on."
A nuclear-armed South Korea would also face severe external blowback. To restart the nuclear program it shuttered due to US pressure in 1975, the same year Seoul ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, South Korea would first need to withdraw from the NPT. That's what North Korea did before testing its first atomic weapon in 2006 (and Iran has yet to do).
Walking away from the NPT would surely be met with sanctions, the extent and severity of which is unclear. But South Korea's booming economy would take a hit, as would all the soft power that Seoul has carefully built for years to become a global pop-culture heavyweight.
In short, going nuclear would hurt the likes of both Samsung and BTS.
The ripple effects would be felt by South Korea's neighbors. The move would likely trigger a nuclear arms race, with Japan next in line, while the Iranians would be even more emboldened to get the bomb. China won’t be happy — especially if the US ultimately decides to (reluctantly) accept South Korea as a nuclear power and maintains its security ties with Seoul.
Pyongyang, which boasts an arsenal of nukes that could turn all South Korean cities into flames within minutes, is unfazed by the hand-wringing in Seoul.
"The North Koreans don't necessarily believe the South Koreans would [build their own nuclear weapons] if the US was against it, given how they think about South Korea being a US puppet anyway," says Town. "But they know it's a useful discussion in order to bring discord in the alliance."
Will the US subs deal get the South Koreans to back off? On the one hand, America being able to respond to a North Korean attack within minutes instead of hours might give Kim some pause. But moving the nukes from Guam won't matter if America doesn't act fast enough to order a nuclear strike on Pyongyang.
Still, it’s a tough choice: Risk atomic annihilation or turn international pariah that no amount of “Squid Game” diplomacy can fix.South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meets with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos during a news conference in Washington, DC.
“Squid Game” diplomacy
When US President Joe Biden hosts South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol at the White House on Wednesday, the two leaders will have a lot to talk about.
Biden hopes to reassure Yoon that America would defend South Korea from a North Korean nuclear attack amid rumblings that Seoul wants its own nukes because it fears the US might not respond fast enough if Kim Jong Un pushes the red button. For his part, Yoon needs something from Biden that he can sell as a win back home, where Yoon's approval rating has tanked following the Pentagon leak that suggested the US was snooping on its ally.
Biden agreeing to ease US export controls on South Korean firms or IRA tax credits for South Korean-made electric vehicles would do the trick. But that's about as likely as Seoul doing what Biden wants: supplying weapons to Ukraine.
So far, what Yoon is getting from his almost week-long state visit is a windfall of investments by US companies in South Korea, starting with $2.5 billion from Netflix. The streaming giant is bullish on America’s appetite for South Korean pop culture, which in recent years has turned the nation into a global soft-power heavyweight.