At a historic three-way summit with the leaders of Japan and South Korea on Friday, US President Joe Biden will unveil increased security cooperation in an effort to reassure China, which has already expressed its unhappiness.

Before recently, the conference at the presidential retreat Camp David in the highlands west of Washington would have been unthinkable because the two treaty-bound US allies had been at odds over the cruel Japanese rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945 for decades.

However, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has turned the page by settling a disagreement over forced labor during the war and instead referring to Japan as a partner at a time of high tensions with both China and North Korea. Yoon Suk Yeol is taking political risks at home.

According to US sources, in an effort to institutionalize the advances, Biden, Yoon, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will consent to a new three-way crisis hotline, regular military drills, and the holding of trilateral summits every year.

Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, declared that “we have created something that is exactly what China was hoping would never happen.”

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