South Korea and Japan Play Nice at Tri-lateral Meeting for Now
It will be interesting to see how long this cooperation lasts:
Despite repeated attempts by reporters to bait him into dredging up lingering resentments against Japan, a senior South Korean diplomat bit his tongue, downplaying 70-year-old tensions at a trilateral meeting in Washington.
“Diplomacy is about trying to find a way to work together while we have healthy differences on issues,” South Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yong told reporters at the State Department on Thursday.
Cho said South Korea had not changed its stance “on the issues of history,” but understood that cooperation between Korea and Japan was “beneficial to both governments.”
The press conference played perfectly into Washington’s Asia rebalance strategy, which relies on the U.S. mediating differences between Japan and South Korea in order to better coordinate on China’s economic and military rise in the region.
“We have an extraordinary array of shared interests and that’s built on a foundation of shared values,” Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken said during the joint press conference. “That was obvious to me in conversations we had over many hours today covering an extraordinary array of issues.” [Foreign Policy]
You can read the rest at the link, but I will get excited about cooperation when I see something more tangible happen between the two countries.
