US, Japan, South Korea Face a Security Dilemma

On August 18, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol agreed to expand security and economic ties at an epoch-making summit at the U.S. presidential retreat of Camp David.

At their first-ever stand-alone summit, the three leaders pledged to bring trilateral security cooperation to “a new height.” Specifically, they agreed to regularize the trilateral summit and ministerial level talks, to strengthen the mechanism for sharing information in an emergency, to hold multi-domain joint exercises every year, and to start the real-time sharing of missile warning data on North Korea by year’s end.

Behind this move is the Biden administration’s strategy to mobilize its allies and friendly nations to take collective actions under the principle of international cooperation, rather than the unilateralism that former President Donald Trump had advocated. And to do so, the Biden administration is asking its allies around the world, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Japan, and South Korea, to shoulder additional security burdens.

In other words, the U.S. admits that it can no longer maintain the international order on its own. “America is not the world's policeman,” as then-President Barack Obama recognized in 2013.

In addition, Biden has had a strong belief that Japan and South Korea should work together as U.S. allies in Asia since he was vice president in the Obama administration. The Biden administration is apparently striving to create an irreversible trilateral partnership, with South Korea’s propensity for political flips in mind. Every time there is a change of government in Seoul, South Korea's policies toward Japan and North Korea swing from left to right and right to left.

The move to institutionalize trilateral cooperation is an attempt to hedge against future changes of government – which happen frequently, as each South Korean president is constitutionally limited to a single five-year term.

Meanwhile, both Japan and South Korea increasingly want the United States to provide an enhanced extended deterrence, in which Washington pledges to protect its allies with force, including nuclear weapons, to prevent North Korean aggression and to counter China's assertiveness in the region.

In such a severe security environment, the trilateral summit was a much-needed political and diplomatic event. And it signified that East Asia has entered a historic phase in security terms.

While Japan, the United States, and South Korea aim to accelerate the strengthening of their security cooperation, China, North Korea, and Russia are also expected to respond accordingly by enhancing security cooperation with a stronger sense of solidarity both on the military and diplomatic fronts.

Early signs of such incidents are already appearing as China and Russia have increased military drills and joint patrols around Japan in recent years. In addition, Russia and North Korea – both increasingly isolated from the West and under economic sanctions – also have advocated closer military collaboration, most symbolically, with Moscow trying to secure supplies of weapons from Pyongyang to aid Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

In the meantime, Pyongyang continues to boost what it calls the country’s self-defense nuclear war deterrence forces against Washington. This, in turn, makes the trilateral cooperation among Tokyo, Seoul and Washington more solid.

This is a classic security dilemma. If one side strengthens its collective deterrence, the other side also strengthens its collective deterrence to match it. This is a law of action and reaction, bringing about a vicious circle of military expansion. And if tensions rise too much, we could be forced into an unexpected – and unnecessary – conflict that no country actually wants.

It is, of course, true that the U.S. military presence has been the stabilizing force in Northeast Asia, including the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, for decades. It has deterred North Korea from invading South Korea again, or the People’s Republic of China from invading Taiwan. And most South Koreans and Japanese have been happy to have American troops on their country’s soil.

By contrast, North Koreans and the Chinese would be delighted if American troops go home, as former U.S. President Donald Trump used to constantly suggest. A weaker deterrence provided by the United States would destabilize the entire region and have harmful global knock-on effects.

But there are still some concerns that East Asia will be divided if both blocs strengthen deterrence single-mindedly. In particular, a group of experts on international relations raised concerns that Japan will be dragged into a collision between the United States and China, which are intensifying their struggle for global hegemony. As is often said, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula may become two major hot spots where confrontations between both sides intensify.

Kosaka’s Three Systems Theory

Kosaka Masataka (1934–1996), a well-known professor of political science at Kyoto University, said in his bestselling book “International Politics: Fear and Hope” that international politics consists of three systems.

According to Kosaka, these three systems are a system of values (or justice), a system of interests, and a system of power. Kosaka advocated a theory that international relations are intricately intertwined with these three systems.

“What makes the issue of peace among nations difficult is that it arises from a complex combination of these three systems,” Kosaka said. “However, people have traditionally focused their attention on one system when discussing peace.”

That is true. For example, looking back, Japan waged a reckless war against the United States as the whole nation was caught up in the system of values, which was an idea that Tokyo needed to liberate Asia from the domination of White races from Europe and the United States.

In other words, wartime Japan strongly reinforced the system of values and lacked the proper perspective of a system of power and a system of interests vis-à-vis the U.S. Many ordinary Japanese at that time had a strong conviction that the nation could win against the U.S. even if only armed with bamboo spears. There was no rational analysis of the system of power and the system of interests, which ultimately caused devastating damage in Japan.

Most recently, ideology has again returned to the forefront of foreign policy. “As we embark together in this new era, our shared values will be our guide and a free and open Indo-Pacific, in which our half-billion people are safe and prosperous, will be our collective purpose,” the leaders of the United States, Japan, and South Korea said in their joint statement last month.

However, as Kosaka pointed out, values can be nebulous. “There are many justices in the international community,” he wrote. “Therefore, the justice that is spoken here and there is just only one specific justice. It is not uncommon to see what one country thinks is right to be wrong for another country. And any tensions and conflicts can arise from there.”

One Southeast Asian diplomat based in Tokyo echoed such views.

“We don’t want to see Japan and China fighting. We need a stable region. We are a smaller, weaker nation and have lots of economic ties with China,” the diplomat, who requested anonymity, told The Diplomat on August 21.

Japan, the United States, and South Korea should not be caught up in the system of values too much if the three nations want to get extensive support worldwide. Instead, from a broader perspective, now is the time to try to make efforts to build a security mechanism to promote regional stability and ease tensions.