Commentary
It seems that China has been able to accomplish something that 70 years of U.S. diplomacy could never achieve: push Japan and South Korea closer toward something like a strategic partnership. Earlier this month, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol flew to Tokyo to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minster Fumio Kishida—the first official visit of a South Korean president to Tokyo in twelve years.
This summit was no small thing, given long-standing chilly relations between Tokyo and Seoul. If Japan and the United States see themselves in “strategic competition” with China, South Korea has historically viewed Japan as its main competitor. Korean animosity toward Tokyo is rooted in Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, when Korean culture and language were suppressed and Japan used Koreans as a source of slave labor (and worse)….