Japan and South Korea have agreed to link radar systems to share real-time data on North Korea's missile launches, Reuters reported on May 9. Senior representatives from the two countries and the United States plan to finalize an agreement on the sidelines of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia's premier security conference. The event begins June 2 in Singapore.
A pact will result in Japan receiving live radar data of North Korean missile launches faster because the South's radars are far closer to launch sites. Tokyo-based Lance Gatling of Nexial Research tells Newsweek that with the information from South Korea, Japan will be able to turn its radars to the right direction before the North Korean missiles even appear on the horizon. Moreover, South Korea can obtain data from Japan's earth observation satellites.
As Gatling points out, the only deal pursuant to which South Korea and Japan share military information is the 2016 General Security of Military Information Agreement, better known as GSOMIA. This pact, however, does not authorize the exchange of real-time data.
Both Japan and South Korea—formally, the Republic of Korea—are treaty allies of the U.S., but the two countries are not allies of each other.
The South, especially when it has been governed by so-called "progressive" governments, has treated Japan as an enemy. For instance, former President Moon Jae-in, whose term ended a year ago this month, distanced his country from the United States and Japan and embraced North Korea and China.
Moon, under intense pressure from Washington, did not formally terminate GSOMIA but essentially ended his government's participation in it.
Moon's successor, the "conservative" Yoon Suk Yeol, has reversed course. Yoon, for example, is reviving GSOMIA and working closely with Tokyo, but he has suffered an inevitable loss of popularity in the process. South Koreans, across the political spectrum, remember that at the beginning of the last century Japan both annexed Korea, turning it into a colony, and tried to obliterate Korean identity. Hatred of Japan today runs deep in both Koreas.
Yet Yoon, the current president, can see that South Korea faces existential threats from China and North Korea and that the U.S. cannot easily defend his country without Japan's active assistance. He has, therefore, cooperated with American attempts to build defense ties between his government and Tokyo.
That cooperation was symbolized by South Korean and Japanese flag officers hitching a ride on the USS Maine, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, in April. The embarkation was a first.
The U.S. has a stake in closer Seoul-Tokyo ties. "The recent improvement in Republic of Korea-Japan relations is an important step toward enhancing the national security and national prosperity of both nations and the United States," David Maxwell of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Newsweek. "In particular, the increasing military cooperation among the three countries in terms of air-power integration, maritime activities, cyber coordination, and missile defense is focusing them toward an integrated missile defense system and establishing the foundation for a possible future trilateral alliance."
This, Maxwell points out, is a situation that China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—North Korea—"desperately want to prevent."
It is, however, Chinese and North Korean provocations that are forcing South Koreans to shelve, at least for the moment, centuries of enmity. Moreover, those provocations are moving Japan away from now-ingrained pacifism. In Tokyo, the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in December announced a plan to increase defense spending by more than 50 percent in five years.
Hostile Chinese and North Korean activities will inevitably push Seoul and Tokyo even closer together. Gatling believes that they will cooperate in data collection involving their peripheral seas, namely the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. South Korea calls the last body of water the East Sea.
Success in limited areas, Gatling notes, "should encourage broader talks in the future, normalizing such exchanges and hopefully highlighting the potential value of a direct, bilateral security relationship between South Korea and Japan."
The U.S. has not yet been successful in creating that "trilateral alliance" in North Asia, but Washington has been busy stitching up alliances and near-alliance arrangements elsewhere. There is, for instance, the AUKUS pact of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, announced in 2021. The deal reinforces treaty and other arrangements binding Canberra, London, and Washington to each other.
Moreover, Australia, Japan, India, and the U.S. form the Quad, which is not a formal multilateral alliance but is nonetheless operationalized by military agreements. In particular, India and the U.S. have been working closely with each other, entering into a 10-year defense framework agreement in 2015. The Quad, like AUKUS, is the result of a shared perception that the People's Republic of China must be contained.
China, which maintains the world's largest military, is the strongest military power in the region, but it is by no means as strong as the coalitions that are forming in reaction to its belligerence.
That's why the inking of a Japan-South Korea-U.S. deal next month in Singapore is crucial. At the moment, Japan is called America's "cornerstone ally" in Asia. Extended cooperation with Seoul will mean America will soon have two cornerstones in the region.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
