WASHINGTON, – The potential change of government and other domestic political factors could pose risks to the sustainability of agreements from this year’s landmark summit among South Korea, the United States and Japan, experts said Wednesday.
At a forum in Washington, prominent experts discussed efforts to institutionalize three-way cooperation delineated in the agreements that President Yoon Suk Yeol and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Joe Biden and Fumio Kishida, reached at the Camp David summit in August.
The three leaders’ first stand-alone summit produced a set of agreements, including the “commitment to consult” each other in the event of a common threat, the regularization of high-level meetings and of trilateral military exercises.
Experts said that should Biden lose to former President Donald Trump, a potential Republican contender, in next year’s presidential election, the change of government could augur ill for security cooperation among Seoul, Washington and Tokyo.
“If Trump were elected, it does not bode well also for trilateral cooperation because we know that his attitudes about alliances,” Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation chair at the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, said at the forum jointly hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Sejong Institute.
Yeo pointed to Trump’s view about “expensive” military exercises with U.S. allies.
“Trump thinks that these things are too expensive … Why are we paying for them? Why do we need to do this?” he said. “I think that could spell trouble for trilateral cooperation.”
During his presidency from 2017-2021, Trump was seen as taking a “transactional” approach to allies as seen during his campaign-trail accusation of South Korea as a “free rider.” That approach changed as Biden sees regional allies as “strategic assets.”
Lee Sang-hyun, president of the Sejong Institute, noted that political liberals in Seoul have a “harsh” stance against Japan, suggesting that historical grievances stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula could hamper three-way cooperation.
“Liberals have always heavily criticized Japan for the past historical issues,” he said. “That is why my concern is that domestic politics will make the most challenge issue in implementing trilateral cooperation.”
Experts also discussed how to ensure durability of trilateral cooperation among the three countries while noting the possibility of major policy shifts that come with a change of government in any democracy.
Kim Jae-chun, the dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul’s Sogang University, stressed the importance of building domestic public support for trilateral cooperation enshrined in the Camp David summit agreements.
“I think it is very important for each country to mobilize strong and lasting popular support for trilateral cooperation,” he said.
“If there is popular support, even populist leaders will have hard time to nullify these security cooperative measures. I mean, I think populist leaders would go along with these popular sentiments,” he added.
Participants agreed that the Camp David summit brought the level of trilateral cooperation to a new high.
“We are no longer in the space of building trust or restoring relations. We are actually now in a much different place for this trilateral,” said Shelia Smith, John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Source: Yonhap News Agency