A senior US official has suggested that the leaders of the United States, Japan and South Korea will hold a trilateral summit before the end of this year, as they have agreed to meet on a regular basis.
In August last year, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, US President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol held a summit outside Washington.
They agreed to institutionalize trilateral cooperation by holding a three-way summit once a year.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania of the White House National Security Council, spoke about the trilateral partnership in a speech on Thursday.
Rapp-Hooper said that Kishida’s decision not to run in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s leadership election next month is “a reminder that political change in all of our systems is inevitable.”
Rapp-Hooper added that the three nations ”have spent the last year trying to focus on how we can increasingly institutionalize all these different forms of trilateral cooperation so that they will be built to withstand change and endure for the long term.”
She continued, “We will continue this steady drum beat of meetings to build this partnership,” including “by holding another trilateral leader summit before the end of the calendar year this year.”
Even though Biden is not running for a second term in November’s presidential election, his administration is believed to want to make sure trilateral cooperation continues in responding to North Korea’s nuclear and missile development and other global challenges, even after leadership changes in the three countries.