WASHINGTON: With a historic three-way summit with Japan and South Korea, President Joe Biden has further deepened the web of US partnerships in a determined signal to adversaries despite question marks on the political climate at home.

Since Biden took office in 2021, Nato has expanded and mostly closed ranks over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and, in clear if unstated responses to an assertive China, the United States forged a new three-way defence pact with Australia and Britain and ramped up work through the four-way Quad involving Australia, India and Japan.

The United States already has security alliances with Japan and South Korea, together the bases for some 84,500 troops, but will now also plan three-way, multi-year military exercises across all domains along with real-time information-sharing and a crisis hotline.

Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said that alliances were “baked” into the mindset of Biden, who was a senator at the end of the Cold War.

Partnerships can increase other countries’ faith in the direction of the United States, Alterman added.

“This administration believes deeply in the centrality — not the importance, the centrality — of partnerships,” he said.

“The challenge is, all of our partners remember the previous administration, they look at the polling numbers, and they have absolutely no confidence in where the US is going to be in two years’ time, five years’ time or 10 years’ time,” he said.

Previous president Donald Trump loudly questioned the value of alliances, insisting that countries such as Germany and South Korea were not paying enough for the US troop presence and scoffing at Nato’s commitments of mutual defence to all allies.

Trump is again seeking the White House and recent opinion polls have also shown softening support for US military assistance to Ukraine, which has totalled $43 billion since Russia’s attack.

Asked about Trump at a news conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Camp David presidential retreat, Biden said that his predecessor’s “America First policy, walking away from the rest of the world, has made us weaker, not stronger.” “America is strong with our allies and our alliances, and that’s why we will endure,” Biden said.

Tougher task in Asia

Whereas in Europe the United States has led a common defence for decades under Nato, in Asia — seen by Biden as the critical region — Washington has navigated individual alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and Thailand.

One reason for the hodgepodge has been historical animosity between Japan and South Korea, with the Camp David summit until recently unthinkable.

Yoon has turned the page by resolving a dispute over Japan’s wartime forced labor of Koreans.

Yoon, Kishida and Biden said they shared the same vision of a “rules-based international order” — a nod to China’s muscle-flexing in Asia but also to Ukraine, of which Japan and South Korea have been prominent non-Western supporters.

Published in Dawn, August 23th, 2023