S. Korea, US, Japan to hold summit at Camp David

Jul 21, 2023, 05:05 am

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South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shake hands ahead of their three-way talks in Hiroshima, Japan, on May 21, 2023./ Source: Presidential Office

AsiaToday reporter Lee Wook-jae

A trilateral summit among South Korea, the United States, and Japan is scheduled to be held at Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat near White House, on August 18.

“A meeting between leaders of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan is to take place in the U.S.,” the presidential office said in a statement on Thursday. “The exact date and venue for the meeting will be announced in the near future after arrangements between the three countries,” Yoon’s office said.

The meeting among South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida comes some three months after the last session held at G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, in May. By then, Biden proposed the trilateral summit in Washington when the three leaders met.

This will be the first standalone summit between the leaders, different from the others as the previous trilateral meetings were held on the sidelines of international conferences. Besides, it is also the first time that Biden has invited a foreign leader to Camp David since his inauguration.

As such, it indicates that Biden treated Yoon and Kishida with the utmost sincerity. Observers say that the upcoming meeting is intended to declare a strong solidarity between the leaders of the three countries to the international community amid intensifying competition between China and US over global hegemony.

The summit in August is expected to be the decisive factor in the three countries’ security cooperation, as the leaders agreed to share North Korean missile warning data in real time at their previous summit in Cambodia in November.

The leaders are expected to focus on discussing ways to cooperate to strengthen deterrence against North Korea, which has recently launched a series of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs). They are likely to discuss the recently held Nuclear Consultation Group (NCG) meeting, ways to constantly operate security dialogue channels of the three countries, and ways to strengthen the U.S. expansionary deterrence including nuclear umbrella.

Other topics they are likely to address are supply chain issues and their response to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

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