The US Deepens South Korea Ties To Counter China, North Korea

The United States has made moves to deepen ties with South Korea, move officials say would help to check both China and North Korea.

Consequently, President Joe Biden’s defence and foreign policy chiefs have arrived in South Korea for the second leg of a regional tour aimed at boosting Washington’s Asian alliances to better deal with growing challenges from China and North Korea.

While in Seoul, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, will meet their South Korean counterparts for separate talks on Wednesday and hold a joint “two plus two” meeting on Thursday, the first such contact between the two countries in five years.

Blinken and Lloyd’s Asian tour is the first overseas trip by top-level members of Biden’s administration. On Tuesday, the pair were in Japan’s capital, Tokyo, where they joined forces with Japanese officials to criticise China’s “coercion and aggression” and reaffirm their commitment to ridding North Korea of all its nuclear bombs.

The latter topic will be a major focus of Blinken and Lloyd’s discussions in South Korea.

US-led diplomacy on the topic has been in limbo since a February 2019 summit between former President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un collapsed over disputes on US-led sanctions. Kim has since threatened to enlarge his nuclear arsenal in protest of what he called US hostility.

Austin, speaking to reporters before meeting his South Korean counterpart, Suh Wook, called the US-South Korea alliance a “linchpin” for peace, security and prosperity in Northeast Asia, and for a free and open Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

“The US-South Korea alliance is ever more important because of the unprecedented threats from China and North Korea,” he added.

For his part, Suh said it was important for the allies to maintain a strong deterrence and joint defence posture against North Korea, and vowed to strengthen the alliance, according to Yonhap.

But he pointedly made no mention of China, according to Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride in Seoul.

“South Korea’s relationship with China is far more nuanced than Japan’s. South Korea relies on China far more for trade and wants to avoid, whenever possible, a head-on clash with Beijing,” said McBride.

He noted that when South Korea allowed the US to install an anti-North Korea missile defence shield on its soil in 2017, it suffered economic retaliation from China, which sees the system’s radar as a security threat.

On Tuesday, Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, slammed the United States over its continuing regular military drills with South Korea, which North Korea sees as an invasion rehearsal.

“We take this opportunity to warn the new US administration,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement. “If it wants to sleep in peace for (the) coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

Some experts say Kim Yo Jong’s statement is a pressure tactic and that Pyongyang may try to further raise animosities with weapons tests to boost its leverage in future negotiations with Washington.

Asked about Kim Yo Jong’s statement during a news conference in Tokyo earlier on Wednesday, Blinken said that he was familiar with the comments and was more interested in hearing from allies and partners.

Blinken said that Washington reached out to North Korea through several channels starting in mid-February, but it has not received any response. He said the Biden administration is looking forward to completing its policy review on North Korea in the coming weeks and was looking both at possible “additional pressure measures” and “diplomatic paths”.