President Joe Biden is using the presidential retreat at Camp David to help with a diplomatic mission – hosting the first-ever trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea, two countries that are putting aside a fraught history in the face of shared security challenges.
Biden’s summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is meant to serve as a show of force as the countries grapple with persistent provocative behavior from North Korea. It also comes as the president has sought to deepen ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific amid concerns about a rising China.
On Friday, Biden will host the leaders at the secluded getaway in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland where they are set to deepen defense, technology and economic cooperation between the three countries, senior administration officials said.
The leaders will establish annual military exercises, including regular ballistic missile drills, and discuss new intelligence-sharing agreements, officials said. They will take steps to set up a three-way hotline for the leaders to consult in crises and will formalize the trilateral summit, the first of its kind, as an annual event.
The summit will fall short of a producing a three-way collective defense agreement but will underscore “that a challenge to any one of the countries is a challenge to all of them,” a senior administration official said.
The gathering will mark the first time Biden is hosting foreign leaders at the Camp David retreat, a site of historic diplomatic negotiations for past presidents. Biden will greet the leaders at Camp David on Friday morning for the trilateral meetings, and they are expected to hold a joint news conference at the end of the summit.
The prospect of trilateral progress between the countries was not always a given. The relationship between Seoul and Tokyo is…
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