By Donald Kirk
U.S. President Joe Biden projected a superficial image of firmness in defense of America's Northeast Asian allies during his five-day mission to Korea and Japan while trying not to inflame regional tensions.
His assurances delighted South Korea's newly inaugurated President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Always soft spoken, Biden pleased both of them with comments that might have appeared tough but maybe were not.
While playing up "strategic deterrence" in Seoul and Tokyo, he stopped carefully short of seriously deepening the chasm between America's friends and enemies. His goal was not to inflame tensions but to brace up alliances that Donald Trump during his presidency had compromised.
The most important takeaway from Biden's visit to Seoul was the affirmation made jointly with Yoon that the U.S. and South Korea would talk about resuming joint military exercises.
In other words, fulfilling the promises made during Yoon's campaign for the presidency, military planners from both the U.S. and South Korea should map out the war game that commanders believe are essential to the alliance. They say games played on computers are fine, but there's no substitute for troops in real-live action.
If that understanding seems like an escalation, however, it's really not. South Korean and American forces were operating together, on the ground, in the air and at sea, for years before Trump, in one of the dumbest moves of his presidency, arbitrarily canceled them hours after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore nearly four years ago.
I have watched the closing days of several of these exercises, an impressive display on training grounds not far below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.
Assuming Biden and Yoon were serious about resuming the war games, I can imagine seeing them again in a reversion a few years ago when both the U.S. and South Korea looked realistically at standing up to North Korean threats.
In that context, it's important to remember that the joint statement signed by Trump and Kim in Singapore was a vacuous whiff of fluff that promised only to work toward "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
Yoon's predecessor, Moon Jae-in, never got anywhere in three summits with Kim. Demanding an end to sanctions imposed after his nuclear and missile tests, Kim refused even to see Moon after the failure of his summit with Trump in Hanoi in February 2019.
Ultimately, all the hard work that Moon had invested in bringing about reconciliation resolved nothing. His dream of an end-of-war declaration to be signed by all sides in the Korean War is now on the shelf along with so many other futile efforts to bring about South-North rapprochement.
The goodwill engendered by Biden's meetings with Yoon was not necessarily the highlight of his Northeast Asian odyssey, at least to judge from the publicity over Biden's affirmation in Japan of the U.S. "commitment" to defend Taiwan.
The rulers in Beijing have never stopped declaring China's sovereignty over the island province, to which Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces fled as Mao Zedong's Red Army was taking over the mainland in 1949.
Biden recognized there's only "one China," as the U.S. has been doing ever since it transferred diplomatic recognition of China from Taiwan to Beijing in 1978 when Jimmy Carter was president. How then would U.S. forces fight for Taiwan?
A Chinese attack on Taiwan would not be "appropriate," said Biden. It would be "similar to what happened in Ukraine," he said, but he did not say whether the U.S. would respond with air and naval power or troops on the ground. The name of the U.S. game is "strategic ambiguity."
Still, Biden's remarks on Taiwan were what Kishida wanted to hear. The Chinese have been alarming everyone by sending warplanes over Taiwan's air defense zone. They seem to want to keep their adversaries on edge.
It's hard to believe, however, they would be so stupid as to invade Taiwan, 100 miles across the Taiwan Straits. Considering China's stupendous balance of trade with the U.S., the Chinese would risk killing the golden goose from which they've been profiting immensely for decades.
Until Biden dropped his remarks on Taiwan, the most important aspect of his visit to Japan was the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership from which Trump withdrew the U.S. in one of the first misguided moves of his presidency in 2017.
The framework, binding the U.S. and a dozen other nations, is short on specifics. What counts is how or even if they strive for the framework's goals of fair and resilient trade, supply chain resilience, infrastructure and clean energy, tax reform, and the impossible dream of cleaning up corruption.
In Seoul, visiting the Samsung Electronics plant near Osan Air Base, Biden stressed the need for resiliency in the smooth flow of semiconductors to manufacturers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In practical terms, the economic goals of Biden's mission are as important as the military. No one quite imagines war breaking out right away whereas trade never stops.
The bottom line is that Biden, firming up America's role in visits to Seoul and Tokyo, asserted America's support for both these crucial allies while undoing much of the damage done by Trump.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has been covering the confrontation of forces in the region for decades.
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His assurances delighted South Korea's newly inaugurated President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Always soft spoken, Biden pleased both of them with comments that might have appeared tough but maybe were not.
While playing up "strategic deterrence" in Seoul and Tokyo, he stopped carefully short of seriously deepening the chasm between America's friends and enemies. His goal was not to inflame tensions but to brace up alliances that Donald Trump during his presidency had compromised.
The most important takeaway from Biden's visit to Seoul was the affirmation made jointly with Yoon that the U.S. and South Korea would talk about resuming joint military exercises.
In other words, fulfilling the promises made during Yoon's campaign for the presidency, military planners from both the U.S. and South Korea should map out the war game that commanders believe are essential to the alliance. They say games played on computers are fine, but there's no substitute for troops in real-live action.
If that understanding seems like an escalation, however, it's really not. South Korean and American forces were operating together, on the ground, in the air and at sea, for years before Trump, in one of the dumbest moves of his presidency, arbitrarily canceled them hours after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore nearly four years ago.
I have watched the closing days of several of these exercises, an impressive display on training grounds not far below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.
Assuming Biden and Yoon were serious about resuming the war games, I can imagine seeing them again in a reversion a few years ago when both the U.S. and South Korea looked realistically at standing up to North Korean threats.
In that context, it's important to remember that the joint statement signed by Trump and Kim in Singapore was a vacuous whiff of fluff that promised only to work toward "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
Yoon's predecessor, Moon Jae-in, never got anywhere in three summits with Kim. Demanding an end to sanctions imposed after his nuclear and missile tests, Kim refused even to see Moon after the failure of his summit with Trump in Hanoi in February 2019.
Ultimately, all the hard work that Moon had invested in bringing about reconciliation resolved nothing. His dream of an end-of-war declaration to be signed by all sides in the Korean War is now on the shelf along with so many other futile efforts to bring about South-North rapprochement.
The goodwill engendered by Biden's meetings with Yoon was not necessarily the highlight of his Northeast Asian odyssey, at least to judge from the publicity over Biden's affirmation in Japan of the U.S. "commitment" to defend Taiwan.
The rulers in Beijing have never stopped declaring China's sovereignty over the island province, to which Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces fled as Mao Zedong's Red Army was taking over the mainland in 1949.
Biden recognized there's only "one China," as the U.S. has been doing ever since it transferred diplomatic recognition of China from Taiwan to Beijing in 1978 when Jimmy Carter was president. How then would U.S. forces fight for Taiwan?
A Chinese attack on Taiwan would not be "appropriate," said Biden. It would be "similar to what happened in Ukraine," he said, but he did not say whether the U.S. would respond with air and naval power or troops on the ground. The name of the U.S. game is "strategic ambiguity."
Still, Biden's remarks on Taiwan were what Kishida wanted to hear. The Chinese have been alarming everyone by sending warplanes over Taiwan's air defense zone. They seem to want to keep their adversaries on edge.
It's hard to believe, however, they would be so stupid as to invade Taiwan, 100 miles across the Taiwan Straits. Considering China's stupendous balance of trade with the U.S., the Chinese would risk killing the golden goose from which they've been profiting immensely for decades.
Until Biden dropped his remarks on Taiwan, the most important aspect of his visit to Japan was the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership from which Trump withdrew the U.S. in one of the first misguided moves of his presidency in 2017.
The framework, binding the U.S. and a dozen other nations, is short on specifics. What counts is how or even if they strive for the framework's goals of fair and resilient trade, supply chain resilience, infrastructure and clean energy, tax reform, and the impossible dream of cleaning up corruption.
In Seoul, visiting the Samsung Electronics plant near Osan Air Base, Biden stressed the need for resiliency in the smooth flow of semiconductors to manufacturers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In practical terms, the economic goals of Biden's mission are as important as the military. No one quite imagines war breaking out right away whereas trade never stops.
The bottom line is that Biden, firming up America's role in visits to Seoul and Tokyo, asserted America's support for both these crucial allies while undoing much of the damage done by Trump.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has been covering the confrontation of forces in the region for decades.
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