Yoon to hold trilateral summit with Biden, Ishiba on sidelines of APEC in Peru

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will hold a trilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru this week, according to Yoon’s office and the White House.

Yoon is set to depart for Lima on Thursday, with the trilateral meeting scheduled for Friday, his office said.

The three countries have pushed for the leaders’ meeting to build on the progress in three-way cooperation since the landmark trilateral summit at Camp David in August 2023, where they agreed to hold a trilateral summit at least annually, Yonhap news agency reported.

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security advisor, said that at the upcoming summit, the leaders will discuss the importance of “institutionalizing” the progress in trilateral cooperation.

“(Biden) will meet with President Yoon of South Korea and Prime Minister Ishiba of Japan to celebrate the historic cooperation between our three nations and discuss the importance of institutionalizing the progress we’ve made so that it carries forward through the transition,” he told a press briefing.

Sullivan noted that Biden will go to the APEC summit with U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific at a “literal all-time high.”

“Japan, Korea, Australia, the Philippines – a really remarkable record over four years, and that’s what he’s going to hand off to President Trump,” he said.

“And he is going to be making the case to our allies and frankly to our adversaries that America’s standing with its alliances – investing in its alliances and then asking its allies to step up and do their part, which they have done these past four years – is central to American strength and capacity in the world.”

In September, the top diplomats of South Korea, the U.S., and Japan reaffirmed their commitment to establishing a trilateral cooperation secretariat, to be finalized when their leaders meet later this year.

But it remains to be seen whether Yoon, Biden, and Ishiba will finalize the work of creating the secretariat as a government transition is set to take place in Washington in January.

Upcoming discussions are expected to cover their joint responses to regional tensions in light of North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia in support of its war against Ukraine.

Officials from South Korea and the U.S. have confirmed that North Korean troops dispatched to Russia’s frontline region of Kursk have fought against Ukraine.

Three-way cooperation among the U.S. and its Asian allies gained traction after Yoon offered a solution in March last year to address the thorny issue of compensating Korean victims of Japan’s colonial-era forced labor.

As the long-fraught ties between Seoul and Tokyo warmed, the three countries held the Camp David summit – the first standalone trilateral summit that marked a culmination of tripartite cooperation.

The summit produced a series of agreements, including the “Commitment to Consult” each other in the face of a shared security challenge. Since the summit, the three countries have bolstered security cooperation through joint exercises, the sharing of ballistic missile warning data, and other efforts.