Despite tensions, foreign ministers from Japan, China, and South Korea have recently met to cooperate on addressing shared issues such as aging populations, natural disasters, and North Korea’s military development. Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya expressed concerns over North Korea’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the potential military developments the country could receive in return. He commented that Russia’s unnecessary use of force has no place in today’s world, which subtly showed his disapproval of China’s aggressions in the region and the South China Sea. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi mainly made statements on increasing trilateral economic and environmental cooperation. Although the long lasting tensions between the three countries will take time to fully overcome, current events such as American isolationism under Trump and the threat of North Korea expanding its military capabilities have pushed the three together.
This trilateral alliance is a turning point for the East Asian region, as it is the beginning of cooperation between three countries that have historically been at odds. Japan, South Korea, and China all have difficult histories with each other that have made repairing relations difficult. They have begun some economic cooperation already, but relations have remained cold. This meeting to formally establish trilateral cooperation on shared threats and issues—focusing on their common grounds rather than their differences—could be the key to reducing conflicts, negative attitudes, and tensions between these three East Asian powers.
If successful, this cooperation will facilitate combined efforts that would increase these powerful countries’ capabilities to address regional threats. Addressing regional threats would give these East Asian powers more bandwidth to focus on their global influence and projection of power. Higher cooperation and lower conflict would allow the region to prosper. However, in the near future, they must focus on simply improving their relations to prevent conflicts of interest that would cause the alliance to fail. All three countries’ diplomats must tread lightly while the alliance is still new, as this is when it is most fragile.
Alliances often are made to address international security threats, regardless of the general state of relations between involved countries. For example, Japan is also a part of the Quad, an IGO including India, Australia, and the U.S that aims to protect against China becoming more aggressive. Despite seeing China as a potential security threat, Japan also sees value in working with the country to address international threats or issues such as climate change and the threat posed by North Korea. The security threat posed by North Korea and its history of aggressive military actions is a key factor that Japan, China, and South Korea share the same stance on. North Korea is geographically close to all three countries, making it a significant enough threat for even these countries with otherwise conflicting interests to come together.