Biden is shifting focus back to US alliances in Japan, South Korea

But on Wednesday, when the two officials arrived in Seoul, the pins were gone, an acknowledgment that the case carries less weight in a South Korea currently prioritizing involvement in the Kim Jong Un regime.

After four years of the US’s relative inattention to its allies, President Biden has pledged to rebuild ties with foreign friends and to choose two partners at the heart of Washington’s challenges with an emerging China and an increasingly nuclear North. -Korea.

‘It is no coincidence that we chose [South Korea] for the first cabinet-level trip abroad of the Biden-Harris government, along with Japan, ”said Mr. Shine in Seoul on Wednesday.

Japan and South Korea, both of which rely heavily on the US military for their defense, place an unusually high emphasis on receiving US diplomatic affection – noting whether either side ever receives more of it. Tokyo and Seoul have been trying to become Washington’s favorite ally in the region for decades.

This meant worrying about every word uttered by US officials, what the Asian ally first got a presidential phone chat about, and which side deserves US support in disputes ranging from history to national security.

When the US invited Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to the White House last week and became the first world leader to be asked to go to Washington by the Biden administration, the South Korean media freaked out and urged President Moon Jae-in to urge insist on their own journey. .

“President Moon too must visit the US at a not too distant date,” read an editorial in the Seoul Shinmun, a newspaper partially owned by the government for over a century.

It is an important task for the US to get two very different, though interconnected, countries to get along. Both Japan and South Korea are home to tens of thousands of US troops. The two US allies are central to some of Washington’s most vexing foreign policy challenges, including China, North Korea and Russia.

“We are working to strengthen relations between America and our allies,” said Sung Kim, acting US Secretary of State for East Asia, last week. “And none of them are more important than Japan and the Republic of Korea.”

Mr Biden, who was a presidential candidate last year, wrote an editorial for South Korea’s semi-official news agency praising the alliance of the two countries. After taking office in January, Mr. Biden’s administration organized a three-time meeting with Seoul and Tokyo to discuss North Korea. In recent weeks, the US has agreed to military cost-sharing deals with both South Korea and Japan – measures that had been difficult under former President Donald Trump, who often attacked the two allies for not paying enough.

This week, both Tokyo and Seoul have avoided showing their disputes with each other publicly. A government adviser in Seoul said South Korea was not offended by the US’s choice of Japan as the first stop of the trip.

“We accept that Japan is a stronger country than we are,” said the adviser. “That’s international order, and that’s just the truth.”

But Tokyo-Seoul ties remain resentful. The two are fighting a trade dispute that is currently under review by the World Trade Organization. Tensions erupted after a series of South Korean court rulings pulled the forced labor problems from World War II to the present day.

The Japanese refuse to even talk to South Korea, officials and advisers from both countries say. Mr Suga declined to meet with the outgoing South Korean ambassador in Tokyo earlier this year and has not yet met the new ambassador.

On March 1, Mr. Moon reiterated a proposal to Japan and offered to revive the talks to resolve their differences. The gesture has gone unanswered in Japan so far.

The bitterness of the two countries has created security concerns. In 2019, Japan’s unexpected trade sanctions prompted South Korea to threaten withdrawal from an intelligence-sharing pact backed by the Obama administration that could help coordinate a response during a military crisis.

In recent decades, the US has often found itself at the center of, or the cause of, disputes between Japan and South Korea.

When then President Barack Obama met with the leader of South Korea during his first term, the two leaders described their alliance as the “hub” of Northeast Asia. The US had described its alliance with Japan as the “cornerstone” of the region.

After that, a former US official received multiple calls from Japanese officials asking whether “pivot” was more important than “cornerstone,” said Brad Glosserman, a senior adviser to the Pacific Forum think tank in Hawaii who had spoken to the former. officially.

“That’s proof of how stupid that rivalry can be,” Mr. Glosserman said. The US has not since changed the way it refers to each ally.

Last year, when Mr. Trump sent a guest invitation to South Korea for the meeting of the Seven Nations Group, Japanese officials pushed back. Mr Suga, who was the chief spokesman for the Tokyo government at the time, stressed the importance of maintaining the current G7 framework. An official in South Korea’s presidential office accused Japan of shamelessness.

The one-upmanship even included the sequence of Mr. Biden’s phone calls to world leaders after his inauguration in January. In keeping with the tradition of American leaders, Mr. Suga made contact first, while Mr. Moon was called a week later.

But South Korean officials have turned this positively: they have privately noted that Mr Moon’s exchange lasted two minutes longer than Mr Suga’s.

– Alastair Gale contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Jeong at [email protected]