Summit: a watershed moment – 台北時報 Feedzy

By joseph Tse-hei Lee 李榭熙

The Indo-Pacific trilateral summit among US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol at Camp David on Friday was a watershed moment, as the leaders called out China and North Korea as specific adversaries.

This diplomatic gesture is of great significance for three reasons.

First, Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy has passed from the stage of theorizing to that of prioritizing defense objectives. The Indo-Pacific region, spreading from Japan and South Korea through the Philippines and Taiwan to the Indian Ocean, is now perceived as a single military theater that demands well-coordinated deterrence and deployment operations.

The summit has outlined a framework for cross-departmental collaborations among US, Japanese and South Korean officials over security, intelligence, commerce and public health. The immediate goal is to ensure free access across the Indo-Pacific region and the capability to run joint defense operations in the face of North Korea’s military adventurism and rising challenges posed by China.

What is remarkable is that the new leadership in Japan and South Korea appear to have repaired their frayed relationships caused by colonialism and war. Both nations are now providers, rather than recipients, of regional security.

Second, this new coalition is aimed at reconciling the logic of defense planning with the task of military logistics operations in times of crisis.

For years, the desire for stability and cooperation has coincided with an impulse toward conflict and division among rival Indo-Pacific states. Yet the trilateral body highlights the need to align US, Japanese and South Korean forces with the containment of new security risks.

Although the control of territory lies at the heart of Indo-Pacific disputes, such conflicts are likely to occur along maritime borders. The contest for oceanic control is far more direct and intense than the pursuit of crisis management and escalation dominance during the Cold War era, when a superior power could deter rivals from challenging a widely accepted international order.

Today’s Beijing has extended conventional ideas of maritime sovereignty and territoriality in an attempt to enclose the South China Sea. It also utilizes naval and coast guard forces to make territorial claims, and to harass official and civilian vessels from neighboring countries in adjacent waters. Seen from this geostrategic perspective, adversaries need to be identified before empowering nations to meet security risks.

Third, China is reportedly on high alert, fearing that the new alliance would become a de facto Asian NATO. The shape and size of this trilateral body is still evolving, and the Indo-Pacific trio might grow to admit Taiwan, the Philippines and other regional players.

One takeaway is that the US has prioritized the wartime roles of Japan and South Korea as key locations for military deployment. The contours of this thinking are manifest in proposed measures, including regular intelligence sharing, cooperation on ballistic missile defense, multi-year trilateral warfare exercises, and the fight against disinformation and cyberattacks.

Thus, the vast expanses of the Indo-Pacific region would be the center of a growing exchange of military and civilian technologies, communication resources and collaborative opportunities at all levels.

What are the implications of this Indo-Pacific military alliance for Taiwan? Even though Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic ties with the US, Japan and South Korea, its defense would be an urgent matter for this new body.

Insofar as the US and allies continue to support Ukraine in the absence of a mutual defense agreement, being part of the Indo-Pacific coalition does not stop any nation from providing an explicit security guarantee to Taiwan in the event of a military emergency.

Joseph Tse-hei Lee is a professor of history at Pace University in New York.