China Topic A as Biden welcomes Japanese, Philippine leaders for summits

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SEOUL, South Korea — President Biden will welcome two key Asian allies, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to the White House this week for a string of bilateral and trilateral meetings that likely will feature China as the main topic.

Mr. Biden will meet Mr. Kishida as part of the latter’s state visit on Wednesday, then will chair a three-way meeting with Mr. Marcos and Mr. Kishida. Mr. Marcos and Mr. Biden will hold their own bilateral talks Thursday, while Mr. Kishida is slated to address a joint meeting of Congress.

The three-way summit reflects previous regional security-focused trilaterals, including the high-profile Camp David summit Mr. Biden held with Mr. Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in 2023.

Mr. Biden and his guests this week are expected to discuss multiple issues — space exploration, renewable technologies, green energy and computer chip supply chains, but the unsettled security environment in East Asia looms large over the discussions.

Japanese sources expect movement on enhanced command structures. Mr. Marcos and Mr. Biden also are expected to address rumored Pentagon plans to build a base on a highly strategic island close to Taiwan.

Lacking a formal NATO-style alliance in the Indo-Pacific theater, the U.S. has sought to boost cooperation and coordination with regional democratic allies in the face of such challenges as China and North Korea — an effort that has sometimes been hindered by tensions between the allies themselves.

“Mini-lateralizing of the American alliance system in Asia … really is the hub or the core of this effort,” Victor Cha, an analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said at a briefing last week. “What you have is the U.S.-Japan alliance as the core, and what you see is branching off and pulling in others for different forms of trilateral” relationships.

With tensions soaring in the contested South China Sea, where China and the Philippines have engaged in an extended standoff over clashing sovereignty claims, the Washington meetings follow closely on a high-profile naval display. On Sunday, Australia, Japanese, Philippine and U.S. forces conducted exercises in the area, prompting an apparent retaliatory drill by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).

Mr. Biden, Mr. Kishida and Mr. Marcos have firm foundations to build upon, both in the domestic support each has for a firm line against Beijing, and in their joint role in fortifying Washington’s determination to defend Taiwan.

Over the last two years, Chinese access to two strategic choke points — the Miyako Strait and the Bashi Strait — has been significantly compromised, with Manila and Tokyo playing key roles.

Japan is building up its defense forces on the southern Ryukyu Island chain, which dominate the Miyako Strait, with missiles and shelters. Since last year, Manila has granted U.S. soldiers rotational access to an air and a sea base on the Philippines’ northern tip, overlooking the Bashi Strait.

Although not widely appreciated, both straits offer the Chinese navy access from coastal bases to the Pacific. In the event of hostilities, the three allies could deny the straits to the PLAN, if that force sought to blockade or surround Taiwan.

U.S. officials have talked publicly about “sea lines of communication and maritime domain awareness, so dominance of straits is not something that [the U.S.] might wish to publicize,” said Alex Neill, a security specialist with Pacific Forum. “It is pretty obvious that, if there were a conflagration, the U.S. plus the Philippines and Japan would have the upper hand in these zones.”

Japan ponders upgrades

Japan, shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been talking up the significance of this week’s summit. Shigeo Yamada, Japan’s ambassador to Washington, said last month that “2024 will be a pivotal year for Japan-U.S. relations.”

Facing Chinese assertiveness and North Korean threats, Mr. Kishida has accelerated the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s shift away from the country’s postwar pacifism: Japan’s defense budget is set to nearly double to $300 billion by 2027, Mr. Kishida has said, and Tokyo is acquiring U.S.-made longer-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.

A critical piece of Japan’s new approach is to establish a joint headquarters for Japan’s Self Defense Forces by 2025, under a four-star officer. “The Japanese have never had a full-time joint commander,” said Lance Gatling, a former strategic planning officer with U.S. Forces Japan.

In the era of multidomain warfare — land, sea, air, cyber, space — synchronizing joint operations is critical, experts say. Japan has historical weaknesses: One reason Tokyo was defeated in World War II is that, lacking unified command, its army pursued a continental, China-focused strategy while its navy focused on the Pacific conflict at sea.

“Japan has been slow to espouse the idea of jointness. It needs to happen with more focus on China,” Mr. Neill said. “The PLA did exactly that with their military reform 10 years ago.”

There are expectations that Washington is set to upgrade the U.S. deployment in Japan from a three-star to a four-star command, granting more strategic agility than is possible from Hawaii’s Indo-Pacific Command. Also being considered is the establishment of a joint Japan-U.S. headquarters, along the lines of the Combined Forces Command in South Korea.

Mr. Gatling noted that there are seven separate Japanese and U.S. command structures for air defense alone. “Who’s in charge?” he asked. “One of the primary tenets of war is, ‘Don’t divide your forces.’”

Mr. Biden may offer Mr. Kishida — whose ruling Liberal Democratic Party, mired in a corruption scandal, faces low approval ratings and a likely intraparty leadership contest in September — some sweeteners.

Those could include the repair and refurbishment of U.S. Navy vessels in Japanese yards and the joint development of new warship classes with Japan, Mr. Gatling said. A joint command also would offer Tokyo increased access to U.S. technologies and intelligence, Mr. Gatling suggested.

Japanese media outlets have reported that the summit will announce the creation of a joint body on defense technology cooperation. Analysts at the Brookings Institution in Washington suggest that Tokyo could join the AUKUS accord Mr. Biden signed with Australia and Britain in 2021, which eyes joint development of autonomous, hypersonic and robotic weaponry.

But there are also concerns in Japan over the November U.S. election, given that Republican front-runner Donald Trump, while president, questioned U.S. defense commitments in Asia and sought to pressure both Japan and South Korea to pay significantly more for American military deployments in their countries. Mr. Kishida may address that point in Congress.

“Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, I think it is important to make sure that the American people recognize the importance of the Japan-U.S. relationship,” Mr. Kishida told CNN in an interview Sunday.

Bolstering Manila

Philippine-U.S. talks may add clarity to long-rumored plans to build a base on Batan. The island, in the Bashi Strait, lies 100 miles north of the Philippines Luzon and 120 miles south of Taiwan.

Mr. Marcos, who has veered sharply from his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte’s tilt toward China since his election in May 2022, will be seeking reinforced political and diplomatic support for his defense of maritime territories disputed with China, and the protection of his nation’s Economic Exclusion Zone in the South China Sea.

While public references are repeatedly made to the Manila-Washington Mutual Defense Treaty, China is stopped short of open conflict, deploying such tactics and assets as ramming, fishing fleet swarms and water cannon to challenge Manila’s claims in the heavily trafficked waterway.

What this week’s Washington meetings could reinforce is “training, resources, joint exercise opportunities and maritime domain awareness,” Mr. Neill said. “Even if the Philippines don’t have power-projection capabilities, this is part of the broader question of unity of vision with friends and allies.”

Japan late last year confirmed its first-ever foreign sale of defense equipment with an air surveillance radar system to the Philippines. Manila and Tokyo have also been negotiating a reciprocal access agreement, likely modeled on the deals Tokyo has signed with Canberra and London.

While it doesn’t call for basing Japanese forces in the Philippines, it permits the seamless transfer of troops, gear and weapons for combined exercises.