U.S. President Joe Biden will pull out all the stops Wednesday when he hosts South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for a pomp-filled state visit to cap a day grounded by serious discussions, including, analysts say, quiet talks about countering an increasingly powerful China.
White House officials say the leaders will discuss the threats posed by an increasingly bold North Korea, how the two nations can cooperate economically and more.
Yoon will also speak before Congress while he is in Washington.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S.-[Republic of Korea] alliance has grown far beyond the Korean peninsula, and is now a force for good in the Indo-Pacific and around the world,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday.
The leaders “will announce major deliverables on extended deterrence on cyber cooperation and climate mitigation assistance, investment and on strengthening our people-to-people ties,” Sullivan added.
Monday morning, the flags of South Korea and the U.S. fluttered side by side on White House grounds. This is just the second state visit of Biden’s presidency — the first was for French President Emmanuel Macron last year.
Yoon’s visit marks 70 years of U.S.-South Korea relations.
Korea expert Jean Lee, who will participate in Yoon’s arrival and attend a White House luncheon, said the visit shows how far the countries’ relationship has come.
“It started out as the United States vowing to help defend South Korea from North Korean aggression,” said Lee, a Wilson Center fellow and a veteran journalist who established the first foreign news bureau in Pyongyang. “But it has evolved into so much more. … South Korea several years ago was an impoverished, destroyed country. Seventy years later, it is the world’s 10th-largest economy, a powerhouse in so many different industries … and in many ways has become more of a partner to the United States than just this poor little country that the United States had to defend.”
The two leaders are likely to discuss China, said Victor Cha, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, but “I don’t think any of it will be very public.”
Sullivan, in previewing the visit on Monday, did not mention China.
But in recent days, Beijing has chastised Yoon for what state-run media described as “wrong remarks” after the Korean leader said in an interview that “the Taiwan issue is not simply an issue between China and Taiwan but, like the issue of North Korea, it is a global issue.”
China’s vice foreign minister fired back at those comments in a statement that called them “totally unacceptable.” China claims the island as part of its territory, and has this year increased its military activity over Taiwan’s defense space.
“Traditionally,” Cha said, “Koreans have been very shy to talk about Taiwan and very shy to get involved in any sort of contentions between the United States and China. Sort of classic entrapment fears, not wanting to get caught in between their main security patron and their main economic patron. But the situation is changing. Or, the situation has changed.”
But any words are likely to be carefully measured, said Nicholas Szechenyi, deputy director for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“I don’t think it’s so much about what South Korea or Japan says about China,” he said at a briefing previewing the state visit. “It’s about what they do to strengthen deterrence and prevent China from thinking that it could drive a wedge between the United States and its two treaty allies.
“I think there’s wide recognition in the U.S. that as countries on the front lines of the China challenge, Korea and Japan are going to use more nuanced language, and their strategy is going to be more subtle,” Szechenyi said.
Lee pointed to one way Yoon may be trying to counter China’s economic dominance.
“I think it’s interesting if we look at who President Yoon is bringing with him,” she said. “It’s a lot of major players from South Korea’s chaebols — these are the big conglomerates — because many of those companies dominate, particularly in the semiconductor industry. And I think that that’s very specific and it’s very, very deliberate.”
Lee, of the Wilson Center, said this is also a not-so-subtle way for the U.S. to show how other countries benefit from being partners.
“This is a moment for the two countries to show that off, to market, to honor it, and also show the rest of the world what can happen if countries ally with the United States,” she said.
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