US President Joe Biden began his presidency about 15 months ago with the Asia-Pacific region as the North Star of his foreign policy, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine recast his international priorities. Today, Biden touches down in Asia for a high-profile four-day visit to Japan and South Korea — his first to the region since assuming the Oval Office last year.
The trip is a determined effort to refocus US attention with the expected launch of a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) strategy. Although Russia remains the immediate threat to Washington’s security interests, this has done little to alter the administration’s view that China remains the longer-term challenge.
Biden is expected to promote bilateral agendas in Japan and South Korea, but the focus is to be a leadership meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) nations — India, the US, Japan and Australia — hosted by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. While the Quad was initiated in 2007, it has come into greater focus in the past few years.
The seriousness that the Biden team places on the loose alliance was demonstrated last year when the White House hosted the first Quad leadership meeting in Washington, attended by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then-Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga.
While some have dismissed the group’s importance, its relevance as an emerging anti-China alliance was buttressed last year when London, Washington and Canberra announced a trilateral security partnership to defend “shared interests in the Indo-Pacific region,” with China again the unmentioned focal point.
The goal of this week’s Quad meeting is to advance a shared vision for a free and open Asia-Pacific region, with all of the leaders agreeing about the threat from China. This is despite the lack of unanimity within the group on Russia, with Modi an outlier given his refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
Topping the agenda are Beijing and its growing assertiveness, which all four leaders perceive as undermining their vision of a free and open regional landscape. For example, continuing tensions in the South China Sea not only concern Japan and the US, but also other countries such as Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, which are in a dispute with China over the waterway that sees about US$5 trillion of ship-borne trade each year.
Several parts of the discussion will be particularly sensitive for China, including Taiwan’s security and its future as a democracy. The leaders are reportedly to discuss the importance of stability across the Taiwan Strait.
Taipei now counts Tokyo among its closest allies. Any cross-strait conflict would affect Japan, whose westernmost inhabited island of Yonaguni is 150km from Taiwan’s east coast. Tokyo is planning to increase its troop presence there, which is home to about 1,700 inhabitants and 200 soldiers.
These developments only add to the tensions between China and the Quad, especially the US, which could erupt in a bad flare-up.
Ever since last year’s meeting in Alaska between US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅), the mood has been flat at best, with the Biden administration keeping in place the tougher foreign and economic policies of former US president Donald Trump.
However, Beijing is not to be the only focus of the meeting, as Pyongyang is also causing new concern following missile tests this year, including on Thursday last week.
The Quad would not only condemn these firings, which contravene UN Security Council resolutions, but also reiterate the call for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.
On the economic front, Kishida is to discuss with Biden whether he might reverse Trump’s decision to withhold US participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). This is the trade and investment deal originally intended to lock Washington into a deeper partnership with US allies in the region.
There are significant concerns in Tokyo that the new IPEF strategy could undermine the CPTPP.
Japan made deep concessions, partly at the instigation of former US president Barack Obama’s administration, of which Biden was a key part, to ensure that the CPTPP could be signed in February 2016 — only for Trump to walk away from the deal a year later.
Taken together, this is why the Biden trip is crucial. While his immediate foreign focus is Ukraine, he knows that the relationships with Japan, India and Australia are some of the most pivotal in international relations today.
What is agreed regarding China and North Korea, in particular, would affect not just the region, but the whole world.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences’ foreign policy think tank LSE Ideas.
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