Biden ramps up S Korea, Japan ties in sign to China

US President Joe Biden was set to announce new security cooperation with Japan and South Korea yesterday, including joint exercises at a first-of-a-kind three-way summit with their leaders that has already rattled China.

The summit at the Camp David presidential retreat would have been unimaginable until recently, with the two treaty-bound allies -- together the base for some 84,500 US troops -- at loggerheads for decades over the legacy of Japan's harsh 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean peninsula.

But South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, taking political risks at home, has turned the page by resolving a dispute over wartime forced labor, instead calling Japan a partner at a time of high tensions with both China and North Korea.

Biden, Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will agree to a multiyear plan of regular exercises in all domains, going beyond one-off drills in response to North Korea, and will announce a "commitment to consult" during crises, said Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor.

While the United States already works closely with both allies, the new initiatives seek for "this three-way cooperation to get deeper and more institutionalized," Sullivan told reporters at Camp David in the mountains northwest of Washington.

The leaders will also agree to share real-time data on North Korea and to hold summits every year, officials said.

Camp David marks the first time the three countries' leaders have met for a standalone summit, not on the sidelines of larger event, and is the first diplomatic event since 2015 at the resort, which is synonymous with Middle East peacemaking.

Sullivan said the summit would have an "affirmative vision" on how the countries can deliver together and was "not taking aim at a country."

But Rahm Emanuel, the blunt-speaking US ambassador to Japan, took another tone when he previewed the summit, saying that the three powers "created something that is exactly what China was hoping would never happen."

China, the former congressman turned ambassador said, should understand: "We are the rising power; they are declining."

China has flexed its muscle both at home and in Asia under President Xi Jinping, exerting disputed maritime claims and carrying out major exercises near Taiwan, the self-ruling democracy claimed by Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged the two economically developed Northeast Asian democracies instead to work with Beijing to "revitalize East Asia."

"No matter how blond you dye your hair or how sharp you shape your nose, you can never become a European or American, you can never become a Westerner," he said in a video shared on official media.