U.S. President Joe Biden, his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are scheduled to hold an official joint summit at Camp David on Friday.
TIM SHORROCK, timshorrock@gmail.com, @TimothyS
Available for a limited number of interviews, Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist who grew up in Japan and South Korea. He is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence and is currently working on DMZ EMPIRE, his second book.
He recently wrote the piece “70 Years After the Armistice: The U.S. Introduces a New Trilateral Alliance with South Korea and Japan that Could Keep U.S. Troops in Asia Forever.”
See RootsAction article: “Rahm Emanuel Is Bragging About Turning Japan into a Warmaking Nation.”
Thursday morning, Shorrock put out a thread online which began:
“1. Washington has been encouraging Japanese rearmament and the merging of Japanese and Korean strategic interests since the first years of the U.S. military occupation of Southern Korea from 1945 to 1948.
“2. U.S. officials began seriously pressing for Japanese involvement in Korea during the Vietnam War, particularly after South Korea and Japan — under intense U.S. pressure — signed a 1965 treaty normalizing their ties for the first time since World War II.
“3. During the Obama administration, U.S. officials (like Blinken) tried to create an alliance with Tokyo and Seoul by encouraging the two countries to end their long-running dispute over Imperial Japan’s cruel exploitation of Korean sex slaves known as ‘comfort women.’
“4. But during the presidency of Moon Jae-in, a former dissident who championed engagement with North Korea over military confrontation, the idea was flatly rejected. Biden, during his campaign, called the Moon strategy of detente with the DPRK ‘appeasement.’ …
“6. Everything changed when Biden came to office in 2021 and Yoon, a right-wing militarist sympathetic to Japan, was elected to succeed Moon as president in 2022. Yoon let Japan off the hook. Both men embraced the idea of Japan playing a much greater role in military operations.” See full thread.
Shorrock will be participating in a webinar “Axis of War: The Japan-Korea-U.S. (JAKUS) Trilateral Alliance” on Friday at 7 p.m. ET. Other participants are historian Alexis Dudden, Cathi Choi of Women Cross DMZ and SimoneChun of the Korea Policy Institute.