Yoshikazu Tsuno/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts at a trilateral meeting in Tokyo on July 28.
CNN
—
The defense chiefs of the United States, South Korea and Japan vowed to step up cooperation to deter North Korea’s “nuclear and missile threats” during talks in Tokyo on Sunday, the first such talks in 15 years as the nations step up cooperation in an increasingly tense region.
The tripartite meeting comes almost a year after U.S. President Joe Biden held a landmark summit between the three countries at Camp David, part of America’s efforts to strengthen ties with the two key allies in Asia. North Korean Provocations and Chinese aggression in the region.
In a joint statement on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Japan’s Defense Minister Minoru Kihara and South Korea’s Shin Won-sik “recalled our enduring commitment to strengthening trilateral security cooperation to deter nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.”
The statement said the two sides also expressed “serious concerns” about the “growing military and economic cooperation” between Moscow and Pyongyang. Many governments have accused North Korea of supplying weapons to Russia for the war in Ukraine, and the two sides last month New Defense Pact.
The increased trilateral cooperation between the United States, Japan and South Korea signals a shift in regional relations, with longtime U.S. allies Seoul and Tokyo widely seen as trying to put aside historical hostility and distrust to better address common security threats.
Following last year’s summit, Foreign Minister Kishida announced that the two countries would hold regular annual summits of their top officials, including the foreign ministers, defense ministers, national security advisers, finance ministers, industry ministers and commerce ministers. The two leaders also announced new military exercises and the establishment of a crisis response hotline.
This increased cooperation has drawn backlash from Beijing, which, when asked about the Camp David trilateral summit last year, said the Asia-Pacific region “should not be turned into an arena for geopolitical competition.”
Sunday’s joint statement did not explicitly mention China, but the defense secretaries reiterated their opposition to “any unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the Indo-Pacific region” and noted they shared assessments of “recent naval and aerial military activities in the Indo-Pacific region, including the South China Sea.”
China Be assertive China’s assertiveness in disputed areas of the South China Sea, its long-term presence near Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea, and strengthen military threats of the self-governing island of Taiwan.
The defense ministers also formalized a tripartite agreement that reaffirmed “the unwavering nature of a new era of tripartite cooperation,” according to the joint statement.
This will “institutionalize” security cooperation among the defense authorities of the three countries, including senior-level policy consultations, information sharing, trilateral exercises, and defense exchange and cooperation.
According to defense officials, Secretary Austin is also expected to announce his intention to reorganize U.S. Forces Japan (USF-J) as a joint military command counterpart to Japan’s Joint Operational Command (J-JOC).
Details of implementation, which would give a realigned U.S. military presence in Japan a direct leadership role “in both peacetime and potential crises,” will be worked out in a working group led by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, officials said.
“The intent here is for USF-J to be an independent three-star joint force command, ultimately separating and becoming independent from 5th Air Force,” the official said, adding that there is no intention to integrate Japanese forces into the U.S. military command.
“We view this as a historic announcement that marks the greatest improvement in our military relations in the last 70 years. In short, this is a transformative change,” the official said.
“Once this transition is complete, U.S. forces in Japan will assume a direct leadership role in planning and commanding U.S. forces during both peacetime and potential crises, and will do so shoulder-to-shoulder with Japanese forces like never before.”
