ON November 13, 2022, US President Joe Biden met with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The focus of their public remarks was North Korea. ‘For years’, Biden said, ‘our countries have been engaged in a trilateral cooperation out of a shared concern for the nuclear and missile threats North Korea poses to our people’. Kishida concurred, worrying that the tension in the Sea of Japan would continue.
