Japan, South Korea hone diplomatic ‘muscle memory’ amid Taiwan worries

When South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi met on Tuesday, they had energy security atop the agenda – and something harder to name top of mind. It was their fourth meeting in six months, a pace of leaders’ encounters that analysts say reveals much about the uncertainty the two US allies are united in feeling, despite their historical grievances. The formal pretext of their latest summit was energy security. Japan and South Korea, heavily export-driven and almost entirely dependent on imported energy, are among the world’s most exposed economies to the continuing fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran. Both leaders signed an agreement on Tuesday establishing a mutual swap arrangement for crude oil, petroleum products and liquefied natural gas, allowing the two nations to provide oil-related products to one another in the event of an emergency supply disruption. “Recent instability in supply chains and energy markets stemming from the situation in the Middle East has further underscored the need for close cooperation between our two countries,” Lee said in a joint press statement afterwards. The talks took place in Lee’s hometown of Andong, a southeastern city famed for its centuries-old folk village, and followed the leaders’ January meeting in Takaichi’s hometown of Nara, an ancient Japanese capital. The reciprocal visits marked the first time that sitting leaders of the two countries had met in each other’s hometowns, adding a symbolic dimension to their “shuttle diplomacy”. Beneath the careful language of diplomacy, however, deeper anxieties are starting to shine through. The Taiwan issue The meeting in Andong came just days after US President Donald Trump met China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing. Trump later gave an interview in which he declined to offer an unambiguous commitment to Taiwan’s military defence, while warning the self-ruled island against declaring formal independence. This carried implications for Tokyo, whose relations with Beijing have been heavily strained since Takaichi suggested in November that her country could become militarily involved in a potential Taiwan Strait conflict. Most countries, including Japan and the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. Beijing sees it as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary, while Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons. Japan’s anxiety [is] that Trump may take a softer stance on Taiwan Soyoung Kim, political analyst Soyoung Kim, an assistant professor of international studies at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan, said the Taiwan issue offered a “strong strategic incentive” for Tokyo to pursue closer engagement with Seoul. Ahead of Trump’s meeting with Xi, Kim said some in Japan were worried about another “Nixon shock”, referring to the jolt former US president Richard Nixon delivered to Tokyo in 1971 when he announced – without warning or consultation – that he would be visiting Beijing, ending more than two decades of total diplomatic estrangement. More than half a century later “Japan’s anxiety [is] that Trump may take a softer stance on Taiwan,” Kim said. “This matters to Japan because it is not merely a bystander to a Taiwan contingency but more likely a direct stakeholder.” Abandonment fears Relations between South Korea and Japan have long been strained by the Japanese colonisation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Demands for reparations over wartime forced labour and sexual slavery, as well as territorial quarrels and cultural grievances, often flare without warning. Against that backdrop, Lee and Takaichi were being forced into a “pragmatic alignment” as much by circumstance as by choice, said geopolitical strategist Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar and associate professor at the Harvard University Asia Centre in the US. “Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy raises the acute fear in both Seoul and Tokyo of alliance abandonment,” he said. Both East Asian nations were also concerned that Washington and Beijing might eventually conclude a “grand bargain” on trade and security without any meaningful input from US allies, he added. By visibly closing ranks, he said Seoul and Tokyo were signalling to Washington that its Asian allies would not simply absorb the “shock waves” of abrupt US pivots and to Beijing that the region’s democracies remained united. Lee, also a senior fellow at the George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations in Texas, predicted that the leaders’ meetings would increasingly focus more on technical coordination, rather than the grand communiques of the past. “Going forward, the deliverables from these summits will likely pivot away from diplomatic grandstanding and towards highly technical, unglamorous bureaucratic agreements,” he said, citing semiconductor supply chains, maritime security protocols, energy logistics and defence interoperability. ‘Muscle memory’ The two leaders’ “frequent, low-drama communication” aimed to insulate the neighbouring nations’ bilateral relations against “domestic political headwinds”, said Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo. “This routine shuttle diplomacy builds the crucial bureaucratic muscle memory needed to quietly manage shared geopolitical risks without unnecessary public friction,” he said. Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, made a similar point. He argued that the goal was to demonstrate that the Japan-South Korea relationship stood on its own foundations and could not be destabilised by shifts in the geopolitical weather. Lee and Takaichi were not meeting because their countries had “resolved the past”, as Seong-Hyon Lee put it. The territorial disputes, “comfort women” complaints and long memory of colonialism are all still alive in ways that politicians from either country ignore at their peril. What both leaders had concluded, he said, was that none of that could be allowed to prevent the relationship from functioning – because their survival depended on “navigating a profoundly unstable future”.

Japan, South Korea hone diplomatic ‘muscle memory’ amid Taiwan worries

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Energy security and supply chains topped the summit’s formal agenda. The subtext was a fear of ‘alliance abandonment’, analysts say

Energy security and supply chains topped the summit’s formal agenda. The subtext was a fear of ‘alliance abandonment’, analysts say