The United States appears to be stepping into the ongoing trade row between South Korea and Japan amid signs that it could develop into a full-scale economic war.
It is a good thing that Washington is trying to mediate the dispute between its key Asian allies before it is too late. That is surely welcoming for Seoul, but the question is how Tokyo will respond.
It is highly expected that top diplomats from the three countries will hold a series of bilateral and trilateral meetings on the sidelines of the ASEAN forum scheduled for Thursday and Friday in Bangkok, Thailand.
Aboard a plane heading to Bangkok, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would encourage the two countries to patch up their relations in separate and trilateral meetings with South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.
“We will encourage them to find a path forward,” he said. “They're both great partners of ours. They're both working closely with us on our effort to denuclearize North Korea. So if we can help them find a good place for each of the two countries, we'll certainly find that important for the United States.”
The remarks followed a Reuters report that the U.S. has urged the Asian allies to consider signing a “standstill agreement” on the ongoing dispute so they can buy time for negotiations. An unnamed senior U.S. official said the standstill proposal would not resolve any of the differences between the two countries, but would forestall any further actions for a set period of time, according to Reuters.
If the report is true, that could be interpreted as a de facto objection by the U.S. to Japan's move to toughen restrictions on South Korea by removing the latter from its “whitelist” of nations entitled to simplified export procedures, which Seoul virtually sees as a declaration of an all-out trade war. Japan restricted exports of three key materials Korean firms need to produce semiconductors and displays, July 4, in apparent retaliation for the Korean Supreme Court's ruling on compensating surviving South Koreans for wartime forced labor.
As Pompeo said, Seoul and Tokyo must find a path forward, and not go backward. They need a truce. It is time to set aside emotions, have a cooling-off period and think about what is the best course of action.
To do this, Japan should first end this game of chicken that would be destructive not only to South Korea, but also to Japan itself. Japanese firms are already rapidly losing ground in Korean markets as the “Boycott Japan” consumer movement is spreading widely from food, beverage and clothing to vehicles and tourism.
Most of all, Japan should see the security challenges from North Korean missiles that it commonly faces with South Korea and the United States. Pyongyang fired two short-range ballistic missiles, early Wednesday, less than a week after it launched the same number of ballistic missiles.
Japan will reportedly make a decision, Friday, on whether to delist South Korea from preferential export procedures. Any further restrictive measures will have serious ramifications for the bilateral relations and by extension the regional security.
That is a scenario South Korea surely wants to avoid. The U.S. won't want it, either. What about Japan?