Saturday, the Foreign Ministers of East Asia’s largest economies met for the first trilateral meeting in three years. The ministers have met on the sidelines of regional meetings before, but the hope is that this first three-way meeting between Ministers Yun Byung-se, Fumio Kishida, and Wang Yi is a step toward stabilizing relations amongst the competing countries.
Relations between South Korea, Japan, and China have always been tense, but those tensions worsened in 2010 because of a dispute around the Senkaku Islands and Beijing’s increasingly assertive behavior. The subsequent decline in trilateral relations was exacerbated by increasing nationalism in each of the countries. China has seemingly sought to use historic differences between South Korea and Japan to sow discord between two of America’s key Asian allies.
Last weekend’s meeting is therefore an important development for U.S. strategic interests in Asia. Both Japan and South Korea are U.S. treaty allies and both host U.S. military forces. U.S. officials hope reconciliation between South Korea and Japan and the diplomatic engagement of China will help set the stage for an effective approach to North Korean aggression.
China and Japan are America’s biggest trade partners in the Asia–Pacific region. The U.S. has a free trade agreement (FTA) with South Korea and is engaged in talks to make Japan part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Next month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to visit the U.S. for eight days beginning April 26, and South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to visit later in the year.
Already last week Chinese and Japanese senior foreign officials held the first security dialogue in almost four years. Talks included opening a dialogue between the two states to keep from destabilizing relations even further during ongoing territorial disputes in the East China Sea. China also voiced its concern over the changes in Japanese defense legislation—specifically Japan’s move towards expanding arms exports to nations other than the U.S. Sometime within the next several months the U.S.–Japan mutual defense guidelines are to be released.
While there is little expectation for trilateral relations to immediately return to a pre-2010 level, the news that each country is pushing ahead with high-level meetings is a promising sign. Already the ministers have noted the possibility of a trilateral leaders’ summit, a first for the three countries newest leaders, though bilateral meetings began taking place in the latter half of last year. As the U.S. is concerned in the region, the better our security and trade partners can work together, the more easily our allies in South Korea and Japan can advance strategically and economically with the U.S.
