National Review Online
Monday, August 21, 2023
On Friday, President Biden achieved a foreign-policy
breakthrough with potentially massive implications for China’s designs across
its neighborhood: a Camp David summit with Japanese prime minister Fumio
Kishida and South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol.
That’s because while Japan and South Korea, both
U.S.-backed democracies in a dangerous neighborhood, should be natural allies,
they have had a strained relationship owing to long-standing historical
controversies related to Japan’s decades-long occupation of Korea. That history
has stood in the way of building a united front of America’s allies in the
region capable of countering Beijing. But Biden’s attention to this dynamic and
the political courage of both Yoon and Kishida might have just ushered in a new
relationship between the countries.
This administration’s China strategy is often
contradictory, or anemic, as we’ve written many times before. But if there’s
one major thing that it has gotten right, it’s the need to create a latticework
of alliances that protect the status quo from the Chinese Communist Party’s
dangerous revanchism.
The administration has relentlessly pursued
that objective. Biden first continued and deepened President Trump’s revival of
the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, connecting Washington with Tokyo, New
Delhi, and Canberra across a range of different topics.
Then, there was the AUKUS deal, which will allow for the
transfer of submarines and U.S. and U.K. technological know-how to Australia
(though this won’t bear fruit for several years). Also important was the
Pentagon’s deal with the Philippines to grant America access to further
military bases there. And now, the consummation of the administration’s
long-running dialogue with the Japanese and the South Koreans over crafting a
durable peace in the region.
While this won’t involve any sort of mutual-defense pact,
the statements out of Camp David Friday reveal a series of new commitments,
including plans to consult each other on international crises and to carry out
joint military exercises going forward and work together on anti-missile
defense.
Team Biden explicitly and repeatedly denied that this
development was a response to Chinese aggression, just as it has done when pursuing
the other building blocks of this new alliance system in the region, and joint
documents issued by the three partners after the meeting place the typical
pablum about climate right next to real security issues, such as Taiwan and the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. They also expressed a commitment toward the
“complete denuclearization” of North Korea and sharply criticized
Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea.
But whether the White House is trying to avoid getting
out in front of Kishida and Yoon, who have far more delicate relationships to
manage with Beijing, or is protecting the administration’s ill-advised drive
for détente with Beijing, the truth is just common sense: Without
the threat of Chinese military aggression, there would be no impetus for Japan
and South Korea to get together like this. There would have been no Camp David
summit.
Either way, this is another own goal by
Beijing, which is already pitching a fit about this diplomatic initiative. The
CCP’s Global Times propaganda outlet, in an editorial, intoned
that China “will not sit idly by and watch actions that jeopardize [its] own
interests.” Beijing’s tack so far appears to be trying to persuade the two
countries that it’s just not in their own interests to work with Washington
under the new arrangement.
While it seems almost impossible that any of these
leaders would listen to Beijing, there still is reason to worry that the
political winds in Tokyo and Seoul could easily shift, placing this historic
partnership on shaky footing one day. Yoon has already faced criticism back
home for it but has courageously chosen to forge ahead anyway.
The outcome of the summit is structured to enshrine
annual consultations, through annual meetings between the leaders of
the three countries, as protection against those political risks,
but that protection is far from absolute.
The collapse of this arrangement would surely be a great
loss, as it is poised to become one of the keystones holding up the new
U.S.-led security structure in the Indo-Pacific. Nothing less than the fate of
the hundreds of millions of people in the region, including Americans, depends
on its survival.
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