WASHINGTON — Top U.S. envoys on a mission to rally Asian allies around a common approach toward China found themselves distracted by a more immediate security concern: North Korea.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, on their first overseas trip since taking office, meet their counterparts from Japan on Tuesday to start a trip that will also take them to South Korea later in the week. They are seeking cooperation on a united front toward regional security from the countries that host the bulk of U.S. troops in the region and face threats posed by North Korea and China.
The meetings are intended to reassure the U.S. allies of Washington’s commitment after the Trump administration accused Japan of being a security freeloader and sought a five-fold increase from Seoul in the money it spends to host American military personnel.
But just hours before the start of formal discussions, the Biden administration said North Korea has so far snubbed its requests for talks. “We’ve reached out to the North Korean government through several channels starting in mid-February, including in New York, and to date, we have not received any response from Pyongyang,” State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter said at a Monday briefing.
North Korea’s official media, which during the U.S. presidential campaign called Biden an “imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being,” has yet to mention him by name since his election victory.
Leader Kim Jong Un turned up the heat on the new administration a few days before Biden was inaugurated by calling the U.S. his “biggest main enemy” and saying he would put North Korea on a path to develop more advanced nuclear technologies and missiles.
North Korea’s official media previously lauded Donald Trump for holding three summits with Kim, celebrating what it called a “special chemistry” between the two. But the talks resulted in no steps to wind down North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. During Trump’s tenure, North Korea built its stockpile of fissile material, developed more powerful atomic weapons and tested new missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads to all of the U.S. mainland.
Before the formal talks began in Tokyo, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the leader, launched a rhetorical attack on joint military drills involving the U.S. and South Korea that started this month. She warned of possible retaliation, telling leaders in Seoul that they “may find themselves in extreme uneasiness,” according to comments published Tuesday by the state’s official Korean Central News Agency.
In comments directed at the Biden administration, she said: “If it wants to sleep in peace for coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step,” according to KCNA, without mentioning the president by name.
The trip comes after Biden on Friday held the first virtual summit with so-called Quad partners Australia, India and Japan, all of whom have their own tensions with China. A statement released after the meeting referred to an “open” Indo-Pacific region and shared security interests, leaving little doubt the talks were a show of unity against Beijing.
“As countries in the region and beyond know, China in particular is all too willing to use coercion to get its way,” Blinken and Austin wrote in a joint opinion piece in the Washington Post just before their visit. “Here again, we see how working with our allies is critical.”
Trump’s White House eschewed collaboration with other nations on trade and the environment, instead opting to confront China on its own with tariffs, sanctions and a beefed up military presence in the Pacific.
Biden is set to maintain a hard line on Beijing — as evidenced by the move to ban the export of 5G components to Huawei Technologies Co. — but his administration is seeking to avoid the perception it is only interested in engaging Asian nations as part of efforts to confront China.
Japan and South Korea both count China as their biggest trading partner and walk a fine line in maintaining a good relationship with both Beijing and Washington.
Japan and South Korea host about 80,000 U.S. military personnel between them, the bulk of American presence in the region. The troops are meant to be a front-line defense against North Korea and provide a counterweight to China.
Beijing has intensified its campaign to dominate the resource-rich South China Sea and has been challenging Tokyo over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that both sides claim.
