Top U.S. officials highlighted “unprecedented” defense and economic cooperation between South Korea, the United States and Japan, and tighter multinational collaboration against North Korean threats as feats of President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific diplomacy in an opinion piece published Monday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote the piece in The Washington Post, underlining “tremendous results” of Biden’s policy strategy while noting that America’s standing in the region was “at its lowest point in decades” at the time of his inauguration in January 2021.
Their joint op-ed came as Vice President Kamala Harris is set to be formally nominated this week as the Democratic Party’s flag-bearer for the Nov. 5 general election, where she is to take on former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“President Biden brought together Japan and South Korea — two countries with a difficult history — to join the United States in the Camp David trilateral 홀짝게임 summit, spurring unprecedented defense and economic cooperation among our countries,” they said in the op-ed.
They were referring to the Camp David summit, the first-ever standalone trilateral summit among Seoul, Washington and Tokyo, which yielded a series of landmark agreements, including the leaders’ “commitment to consult” each other in the event of a shared challenge.
Blinken, Austin and Sullivan also stressed that under Biden, the U.S. upgraded the old “hub-and-spoke” model of diplomacy with an “integrated, interconnected” network of partnerships, pointing to the trilateral partnership among Seoul, Washington and Tokyo, and the AUKUS security pact, which consists of the U.S., Britain and Australia, among other groupings.
