Korea, U.S. and Japan exploring expanded intel sharing

The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that South Korea, the United States and Japan are exploring ways to strengthen joint information sharing capabilities regarding North Korean missiles, but that the details of such an arrangement remain undetermined.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, left, shakes hands with Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol after their joint press conference following their summit at the presidential office in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on Sunday afternoon. [YONHAP]

The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that South Korea, the United States and Japan are exploring ways to strengthen joint information sharing capabilities regarding North Korean missile launches, but that the details of such an arrangement remain undetermined.

Speaking at a regular press briefing, ministry spokesman Jeon Ha-gyu said there is “no specific decision on how to implement” a trilateral information-sharing mechanism, without ruling out the possibility of such cooperation taking shape in the future.

The spokesman’s remarks were in response to a Yomiuri Shimbun report Tuesday that South Korea, the United States and Japan are planning to link their radar systems to bolster joint tracking of North Korean missiles and accelerate their response to a launch by Pyongyang.

The Yomiuri Shimbun report cited Japanese government officials that it did not identify.

Reuters also reported Tuesday that an informed source said Japanese and South Korean defense authorities plan on linking their radars via a U.S. system to share real-time information on North Korea's ballistic missiles.

The defense chiefs of South Korea, the United States and Japan are expected to reach an agreement on the system on the sidelines of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian defense summit due to be held in Singapore in early June, the source told Reuters.

Seoul and Tokyo’s defense ministers are also expected to hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the defense summit for the first time since 2019.

The reports on a tentative trilateral radar link system come before South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are due to hold a three-way meeting at the upcoming G7 summit in Hiroshima from May 19 to 21, which is expected to focus on the growing military threat from North Korea.

According to an informed diplomatic source that spoke to the JoongAng Ilbo on condition of anonymity, the three countries’ leaders “are likely to agree on a practical system of information sharing at their meeting if negotiations proceed smoothly.”

On Sunday after his summit with Kishida, Yoon said the Washington Declaration between South Korea and the United States “does not rule out Japan’s participation” — comments that were quickly walked back by the presidential office.

The declaration, announced during Yoon’ state visit to the United States, delineates an agreement by Seoul and Washington to establish a bilateral Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) to discuss the potential use of U.S. nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula.

A presidential official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity said the NCG is a “one-on-one high-level permanent consultative body” between South Korea and the United States, and that Japan can make its own arrangements to bolster Washington’s extended deterrence commitment to Tokyo.

The three countries’ leaders agreed at trilateral talks in Phnom Penh in November to increase information sharing, but had not previously agreed on a concrete mechanism to do so.

South Korea and Japan are independently linked to U.S. radar systems, but not to each other.

Both countries are host to U.S. military forces and have defense treaties with the United States, but relations between Washington’s two Asian allies were strained until recently due to disputes stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 occupation of the Korean Peninsula.

Bilateral defense cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo only began to increase in response to a flurry of missile launches by Pyongyang last year.

Tensions between the two countries further eased after the Yoon administration made a controversial decision in March to compensate Korean forced labor victims with voluntary donations from Japanese companies and contributions from Korean companies that benefitted from the 1965 normalization of relations between Seoul and Tokyo.

The U.S. State Department on Monday praised Yoon and Kishida’s weekend summit, with spokesperson Verdant Patel calling it “an important new chapter and a new beginning for our alliance partners and an example of real leadership.”

But heightened trilateral cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo comes as Pyongyang has also drawn closer to Beijing and Moscow.

On Tuesday, Pyongyang’s state media reported North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, where he said Russia “will prevail” in its fight against what he described as “imperialists,” which likely refers to the United States and other Western countries backing Ukraine.

“We send warm wishes to you, the Russian army and the people of Russia for their holy fight to preserve world peace,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted Kim as saying in his letter to Putin.

North Korea is one of few countries that recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, which declared their independence from Ukraine with Russian support in February last year before being illegally annexed by Moscow amid the war.

The North has also pledged to support the two regions’ reconstruction and is allegedly supplying Russia with weapons and munitions to fuel the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, according to U.S. intelligence.

North Korea’s state media also reported Tuesday that Choe Son-hui, the regime’s foreign minister, met with Beijing’s new ambassador to Pyongyang the previous day.

According to the KCNA, Choe met Ambassador Wang Yajun on a courtesy call and their meeting was “amicable.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]