Of course, the mini-summit between Joe Biden and Moon Jae-in in Washington was a success as it was meant to be. Moon was the second foreign leader to be welcome at the White House after Japan’s prime minister, and that certainly should count for something. North Korea was obviously front and center on the agenda, with Biden’s disposition to meet with Kim Jong-un, as was cooperation in chip supply and semiconductor manufacturing in both countries, vaccine partnership, photo-opp with war veterans, etc.
But underneath that harmonious display lies a harsher truth, much like for so many smaller national and regional players when it comes to positioning between the superpowers. To be sure, South Korea can for historical reasons not help but perceive its identity as being part of the Western alliance. At the same time, the rising US-China conflict presents its leadership with a massive headache. It is a fine line that Moon has been and will be treading going forward.
During the joint press conference, Biden explicitly said that the two leaders addressed stability issues in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, serving it up for Moon to follow through, but the Korean Prime minister could not be lured into it. All he was prepared to commit to was a general blabber around how important the region was considering the special characteristics between China and Taiwan and that America and Korea would work more closely on the matter. Full stop.
In other words, on the probably most crucial issue on America’s mind, the growing conflict with China, Moon kind of left Biden out in the cold. This is remarkable, as last week the
FT reported to have knowledge of the White House having pushed Moon hard to adopt strong and robust language against China as part of the joint statement. That apparently didn’t happen, and what the audience basically heard were generalities of shared values, principles, and visions.
What’s worse for Washington is that Moon neither mentioned the QUAD on which Washington has aggressively courted South Korea to become a full member in its containment efforts of China. Sure, there will be some dialogue between the parties, but Seoul will not be pulled into anything that Beijing would consider a hostile move. It must have aggravated the Biden administration, as critics immediately pointed at Moon’s missed opportunity to become a key player in shaping the Indo-Pacific region.
Japan has been a lot more straightforward in showing that kind of allegiance, but Tokyo’s establishment is probably more in Washington’s headlock. Seoul’s leaders have other priorities. They certainly don’t feel it is Korea’s call to sort China out in the Indian Ocean. They know they will need China’s goodwill for any resolution with North Korea and hence the country’s national security. And they are having an eye on trade balances, the one with China being larger than the one with America and Japan combined.
ASEAN nations would have watched very carefully. Many of them are under equal pressure to come out and declare being on America’s side of the table. South Korea didn’t deliver a precedent but rather a game plan to hedge the bets and try to be in the good books of either side. The concept of opportunism rules even more in South East Asia, and their leaders won’t be lured into a definitive anti-Chinese position.
On the contrary, China itself is working tirelessly on establishing a multilateral rules-based order spearheaded under its own regional security umbrella and away from Washington’s influence. For example, when the Philippine president reigned into his foreign minister after an expletive-laced tweet, Beijing and Manila subsequently held “friendly and candid” talks on the Chinese fishing vessels in disputed waterways. The presence of those ships may have just forced the 2 parties to the negotiation table.
As has further been lined out in a weekend
op-ed in the SCMP, China is keen to increasingly draw claimant nations into a dialogue. The Boao Forum in Hainan last month is mentioned, where experts and academics from countries around the South China Sea discussed how to build a new regional maritime order based on regional cooperation by joining hands in crisis management mechanism, tourism development, environmental issues, and humanitarian relief.
One has to see whether and how quickly this Chinese initiative will be graced by success, but we must not forget that China could be in a position to deliver the whole package, from the capacity to oversee a multilateral security construct in the region to the economic incentive for protagonists to embrace it. Ever since TPP was abandoned, America could only offer the military aspect of the equation and has come across as a one-legged giant.
The QUAD might still have to make do with its rather thin US-Japan-Australia-India union for a while longer.
