Does recent East Asia trilateral summit contribute to rules-based competitive order?

Lee Jong-eun

Last week, China, South Korea, and Japan held their first trilateral summit since 2019. Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida arrived in Seoul for bilateral and trilateral meetings with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol. At the end of the trilateral summit, the three leaders announced a joint declaration that pledged cooperation on six major policy areas, including people-to-people exchange, sustainable development and economic cooperation, among others.

Before the trilateral summit, there were concerns and a relatively low expectation for successful diplomatic outcomes. With increasing geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, security disagreements have also widened between China and U.S. allies, Japan and South Korea. On addressing key regional security issues such as North Korea’s nuclear proliferation and stability in the Taiwan Strait, the three countries have grown further apart in their security stances.

These constraints were evident in this year’s trilateral summit. Despite requests from South Korea and Japan, the joint declaration did not affirm commitment to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. Instead, it recognized each country's respective positions on the issue. The joint statement also did not resolve other issues of disagreements, such as China’s forced return of detained North Koreans, Japan’s release of nuclear reactor wastewater into the ocean, China’s concern with the other two countries’ participation in the U.S.-led policy to limit the transfer of semiconductor technology to China.

Instead, the trilateral summit attempted to separate policy areas of disagreement from those where cooperation can happen. The three countries pledged greater cooperation in the areas of education, trade, tourism, and culture, and to institutionalize ministerial-level consultations over these policies. The joint statement also pledged speedy negotiations to establish a trilateral free trade agreement. The summit’s outcome, in a sense, reflects the complicated relationship of the three countries: mutual economic partners but part of competing geopolitical blocs.

The trilateral summit’s impact on East Asia’s geopolitics should neither be exaggerated nor downplayed. On one side, some media sources have speculated the trilateral summit as China's strategy to create a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. By strengthening economic ties with South Korea and Japan, China might dissuade the two countries from supporting U.S. security and economic policies that are adverse to China’s interests. However, as shown by the decline of the Russia-Europe economic partnership after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the sustainability of economic ties depends largely on the context of geopolitical security. Should Japan and South Korea perceive China either as a perpetrator or a bystander in the regional and global security threats, the two countries will more likely strengthen their security measures at the expense of limiting their economic ties with China.

On the other side, other media sources have downplayed the trilateral summit for its one-sided focus on economic cooperation without resolving the security disagreements among the three countries. However, despite limitations, such a two-track approach is aligned with the current U.S. strategy toward China. Though identifying China as a geopolitical competitor, the Biden administration has sought continued bilateral partnerships on wide arrays of policy issues, including sustainable energy and AI security. Under this context, East Asia’s trilateral summit is a complementary pillar to what some have described as the “new Cold War” international system.

The previous Cold War international system, despite a series of violent military conflicts, was also characterized by stable diplomacy and partnership between the competing ideological blocs. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union maintained diplomatic relations and engaged in bilateral trade and cultural exchanges. Western Europe imported Soviet oil and established diplomatic relations with communist China before the U.S.-China normalization. These diplomacies might not have always maintained “peaceful coexistence” between the two blocs, but they contributed to the eventual end of the Cold War “not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Today, the international system appears to be trending toward the return of geopolitical competition between the largely U.S.-led liberal order and the alignment of revisionist countries such as China, Russia and North Korea. Though the United States continues to advocate for China and other revisionist countries’ return to the so-called rules-based international order, a more realistic outcome may be establishing a rules-based competitive order, under which international conflicts are mitigated and compartmentalized from the areas of policy cooperation.

Future East Asia trilateral summits may serve as an institutional pillar for maintaining such an international order. Although the summit may not successfully arbitrate the contrasting geopolitical objectives of the U.S. and China, it serves as a complementary diplomatic venue for the United States to engage China through its East Asian allies. In fact, the foreign ministries of South Korea and Japan are scheduled to hold a trilateral meeting with the U.S. State Department to share the outcome of the recent East Asia trilateral summit.

Though the institutionalization of trilateral diplomacy and partnerships may not prevent conflicts over issues such as North Korea and Taiwan, they serve as institutional checks to mitigate the scope of such conflicts. There is a risk that when a country crosses the “red line” of security conflict, economic partnerships could collapse. The role of the economic and diplomatic framework, however, is to dissuade countries from crossing such a line.

The U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described current U.S. policy toward China as establishing a “small yard, high fence.” The success of the East Asia trilateral summit may be one indicator of the effectiveness of the U.S. strategy, supporting its allies in balancing selective partnership and confrontation with China. It is a challenging balance, but it may be a crucial factor in shaping whether today’s international system will be more or less stable and managed than the previous Cold War order.

Lee Jong-eun is an assistant professor of political science at North Greenville University.