Can Japan and South Korea Unite to Face the Chinese Threat?

Seoul

South Korea’s capital may lie within unnervingly close range of Kim Jong-un’s vast missile armory, but everywhere you go in the South Korean capital you are reminded who the real enemy of this strategically critical country has long been.

In central Gwanghwamun Square, the crossroads of the nation, a 50-foot high statue of the 16th-century Adm. Yi Sun-Sin looks defiantly down from his massive plinth on selfie-taking Seoulites and curious tourists. Yi led Korean forces to the greatest military victory in their history—routing the invading Japanese navy in 1597-98—and became a revered figure in the national narrative.

Across the square stands the lovingly rebuilt main gate of the palace of Gyeongbokgung, home to the rulers of Korea’s 500-year Joseon dynasty. It was restored less than 20 years ago on the spot where the hated Japanese General Government Building, headquarters for the brutal occupation that ran Korea 1907 to 1945, sat.

Every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy, the last remaining “comfort women,” the grotesque euphemism imperial Japan used to describe Koreans forced into sexual slavery for the gratification of its occupying troops, protest Tokyo’s continuing failure to do enough to atone for its crimes.

So when South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-Yeol meets Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida with President Biden at Camp David on Friday, it will mark as significant a development in the shifting geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific as any in a long while.

Japan’s historical savagery, and its refusal to accept full accountability for it, continues to run like a trickle of bad blood through Asian diplomacy. The two nations restored diplomatic relations in the 1960s but have had frequent flare-ups over history and territorial issues, bringing them repeatedly to the brink of outright enmity.

For the U.S., this has long been a nightmare. Japan and South Korea are its two most important allies in Asia, hosting its two largest regional contingents of military forces. The trilateral meeting this week—the first specifically organized summit among the three nations—is not only an important step forward for Washington. It will have big and unpredictable implications for our efforts to contain and confront China.

The collaboration is ostensibly mainly about North Korea. Both Japan and South Korea live at risk of nuclear annihilation by the volatile despot in Pyongyang, and a formal platform of security cooperation with the U.S. is vital for their defense and Mr. Kim’s deterrence.

But there’s no disguising the larger strategic opportunity the prospective alliance represents—a critical new bulwark in America’s increasingly urgent effort to deter our potentially existential strategic challenger—communist China.

Beijing certainly sees it that way. In an editorial last week, Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, said the arrangement placed the security of East Asia at a historic “crossroads” that was likely to lead to a “geopolitical tragedy.”

Rahm Emanuel,

“Are we standing here today putting pieces on the chess board and moving them forward?” he said. “Yes, we are.” Trilateral cooperation, he said, will become a “permanent part of the strategic landscape in Asia.”

Last week, on my first trip across the region in four years, I was struck by the transformed urgency about the China challenge. Asian nations are even more economically integrated with China than the U.S. is and have no intention of jeopardizing that, but they are beginning to share the same agitated assessment Washington has of the threat Beijing poses to regional and global stability. U.S. political leaders and military strategists I spoke to over the summer have clearly shifted from seeing China as a challenge to be contained in the medium term to a potentially imminent threat—with Taiwan as the stage.

Deteriorating economic conditions in China—growth grinding to a halt, another big real estate company on the brink, more than one-fifth of young Chinese adults jobless—feed a gnawing sense that Xi Jinping

I continue to believe that U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia isn’t a distraction from our effort to deter China, as some critics argue, but, rather, by inflicting massive military damage on Beijing’s principal ally, a spur for that effort. Yet it is also true that Beijing is watching as U.S. military capacity is depleted by the assistance to Kyiv.

Building a network of alliances as a makeweight to China is a good move—this week’s trilateral meeting follows the creation of the Aukus defense pact among the U.S., Australia and the U.K. in 2021.

The worry is that we may be entering that dangerous moment history has given us before—one in which, in scrambling to build the proper security conditions to deter a threat, a major power doesn’t deter, but instead encourages its adversary to accelerate its own plans for domination. We are racing against time.