Tokyo, Seoul and an unheralded diplomatic victory

With Ed Luce taking one final pre-election leave to finish his much-anticipated biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, I’ve been allowed back in the Swamp — albeit on a temporary basis. I want to use the opportunity to highlight a hugely important geopolitical development that I think most of the chattering classes either ignored or have already forgotten: Joe Biden’s summit two weeks ago with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts at Camp David.

The reasons that the so-called trilateral summit has been overlooked by the Washington cognoscenti are obvious and perhaps understandable: in the ensuing days, Donald Trump was booked in Atlanta, the Republican also-rans faced off in Milwaukee, and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane went down outside of Moscow. Much to be distracted by.

But none of this should detract from the importance — both symbolically and substantively — of Japan’s and South Korea’s leaders agreeing to work together, alongside the US, on regional defence. It is, in many ways, the culminating act of a year-long series of pacts among American allies in Asia that is unprecedented in scope and scale, at least since the original flurry of treaties signed to secure peace after the second world war. 

The American effort to knit together a collective security structure in east Asia has been a regional priority for decades. Unlike Europe, where collective security has been second nature since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, the US’s relationships with its Asian allies since the end of the cold war have been what American officials have derisively labelled “hub and spoke”. While Tokyo, Seoul and Canberra have happily worked directly with Washington on military and intelligence co-ordination, they’ve rarely (if ever) wanted to work with each other.

That is despite obvious common security threats from both North Korea and, ever more ominously, China. From an American perspective, systematising military planning and intelligence sharing from Hokkaido to Tasmania would not only be more efficient, but would send a clear signal to Beijing that it faces a phalanx of like-minded allies as it contemplates its own increasingly aggressive posture in the Pacific. 

The singular reason behind American failures to bring together a more integrated security structure in Asia is, of course, history. Memories of Japanese aggression during the 1930s and 1940s not only made potential regional allies reluctant to embrace Japan’s remilitarisation, but also shaped political attitudes in Japan itself — making it nearly impossible to abandon pacifism as an organising foreign policy principle. 

The war’s poisonous legacy is nowhere more evident than in South Korea, where the issue of Korean women pressed into sexual slavery during Japanese occupation remains a flashpoint, as does the way Japan’s schools tend to gloss over the history of Japanese colonialism on the Korean Peninsula. 

So what has changed? North Korea’s increasing tendency to fire intermediate-range missiles over the Japanese home islands has raised the threat posed by Pyongyang in the eyes of Japan’s security establishment — more closely aligning it with Seoul, where North Korea has long been the existential threat. China’s increasing belligerence has concomitantly changed perceptions in South Korea, where previous presidential administrations saw Beijing as a needed ally to contain North Korea rather than the potential belligerent — a shift that more closely aligns threat assessments in Seoul with those in Tokyo.

But neither of these developments, I would argue, is sufficient to explain the sea change going on among American allies in Asia. The credit for that should go to Vladimir Putin. Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is often viewed as a European or transatlantic conflict, the war has reset thinking on national security and military readiness globally. In Asia, it has served as a wake-up call that the international order created by the victors of the second world war (but agreed to by almost all nations for nearly a century) is no longer inviolable. The security assumptions that Japan and South Korea relied on for decades, almost by instinct, no longer hold.

This is most apparent in Japan itself, where officials have thrown off the code words that used to characterise any discussion about its military and security services beyond their constitutionally-mandated self-defence missions. Senior officials now talk openly about the need to remilitarise, including improving long-range strike capabilities aimed at China, and in December announced the largest ever increase in postwar military spending. Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister who came into office with a relatively dovish reputation, has defied expectations by not only achieving detente with Seoul, but also inking consequential new security co-operation agreements with Australia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. 

But it is not just Japan. There have been so many regional co-operation agreements and security commitments in the past year that they are hard to keep track of. Thirty years after the US was forced to lower its flag at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station, the American military has been invited back to nine separate Philippine military facilities in locations offering easy access to the waters off Taiwan and the South China Sea. Australia announced that it would purchase three US-made Virginia-class attack submarines before building its own nuclear-powered fleet with the UK as part of the Aukus pact. Seoul won agreement from the White House to send “strategic assets” — Pentagon-speak for nuclear-armed ships and aircraft — to South Korea with more frequency. American allies, long complacent about their security status in a rules-based international order, are all rapidly rearming and dropping objections to regional co-operation in the wake of a Russian invasion that shattered their complacency.

To be sure, these are achievements that could be reversed. Seoul’s change of heart is largely the personal project of South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk Yeol, a political outsider who is more pro-America and anti-China than most among his country’s foreign policy elites. Similarly, a second Trump administration could . . . well . . . who knows what a second Trump administration could do. But the former president has not shown himself to be a fan of international alliances. That said, the White House is mindful of the need to future-proof the agreement and has worked hard to make it difficult for any new administration to reverse the progress made thus far. 

The remaining question, then, surrounds the consequences of all this remilitarisation and alliance building. For those who believe in the old Reagan maxim that peace is achieved through strength, the prospect of a new arms race — particularly one that is led by America and its treaty allies — is a welcome development. But if the impetus behind those geostrategic moves is a Putin-induced disintegration of an international order that provided the guardrails that prevented large-scale conflict for most of the past 70 years, rearmament could take Asia on a very different and darker path.

Taylor, my question for you is whether you agree with the Washington foreign policy consensus that increased military spending and security integration among America’s Asian allies is an unadulterated good. As you can probably tell, I think it’s an unheralded diplomatic victory for the Biden administration. But I also have this nagging concern that we are heading into uncharted waters in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, waterways where the arms build-up on both sides could either encourage all belligerents to see reason — or spark a confrontation.

PS a note to readers, there will be no Swamp Notes on Monday due to Labor Day. We’ll be back in your inbox next Friday.

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• The flip side of the US diplomatic offensive in Asia is China’s ongoing effort to win over non-aligned countries in the region, particularly some smaller island nations in the south Pacific. The Washington Post recently had a fascinating look at how that effort has failed spectacularly in Fiji, of all places. 

• OK, I’m going to admit it: My favourite story to come out of the Trump indictment in Georgia was the New York Times’ take on the history of people grinning for their mug shots. Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis got the most attention when she appeared all smiles during her turn at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office. But Al Capone and Pablo Escobar were similarly toothy when they were booked. Who knew?

• I’ve been somewhat bemused by the fact that, other than Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican who received the biggest bump from the recent televised debate has been Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor. She had a nice pop at Ramaswamy’s incoherent foreign policy positions, but otherwise I didn’t see her performance as transformational. Mark McKinnon, one-time Republican operative turned anti-Trump apostate, had a go at explaining Haley’s appeal in Vanity Fair. Not sure I agree, but worth a read. 

Taylor Nicole Rogers responds

Peter, I am inclined to agree with your assessment of our Asian allies’ newfound co-operation. Increased integration can only be a net positive to our collective security (swelling military budgets, not so much, but that could be a Swamp Note of its own).

But, unlike some in Washington, I am not ready to congratulate the Biden administration just yet. I wonder if one reason the American public skimmed over the Camp David summit is that, despite the White House’s best efforts, the whole thing felt very fragile?

Fumio Kishida, Yoon Suk Yeol and Joe Biden all face serious electoral challenges over the next year. It would probably only take one of them being unseated to put the whole thing in serious jeopardy. Changes of government have hampered previous attempts to bring Tokyo and Seoul together.

I do not think the electorates of Japan, South Korea or the US are as committed to preserving the international order in Asia — or Europe for that matter — as those at Camp David profess to be. We have all seen a steady rise in rhetoric about international alliances being expensive and useless, especially here in the US.

Worst of all, China and North Korea have proved themselves to be very aware of this tension and capable of manipulating it. So as much as I want to, I just cannot get up my hopes that these strengthened security ties will hold.

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And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “A modest proposal to change presidential debates”:
“Ramaswamy reminds me of Adam Neumann of WeWork shame. Same oversized ego, same empty bluster. It’s odd how that personality type attracts so much venture investment.” — Lisa Church

“Republican isolationism is as dead wrong today at it was 1919-1940. Prevailing in Ukraine is a core vital interest of the United States. A larger, economically more successful, more democratic Europe bolsters America’s and the democratic alliance’s overall strength on the Eurasian continent. Ukraine adds great weight to central Europe specifically and the European Union generally while bolstering the eventual success of the EU’s Balkan expansion, another ‘last piece’ in the European Project.” — Paul A. Myers