My name is Mary Trimble, and I am a reporter for the Morning Dispatch.

On August 18th, President Joe Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishita and

South Korean President Yun Suk-yul at Camp David.

The summit marked the first time the three had gathered for a standalone meeting, and

represented a deepening of trilateral ties between the three countries on security,

the economy, and science and technology.

Here to discuss the significance of that summit for the three countries involved, and the

broader dynamics of the Indo-Pacific region is Michael Beckley, Director of the Asia

Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Associate Professor of Political Science at

Tufts University, and a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Michael Beckley.

Michael Beckley, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast.

It's great to be here.

Thanks, Mary.

So, before we dive into the details of this deal, I thought we might start with a little

bit of table setting.

If our listeners don't follow this region carefully, it might seem kind of obvious that two democracies

in the region, two US allies, would dive into this trilateral agreement with the US.

But why is it actually kind of surprising that we saw this happen last week?

I think it's hard to overstate the amount of antipathy that South Korean society has

for Japan because of their brutal history, especially in the first half of the 20th century,

where Japan annexes Korea in 1910 and basically treats it as a vassal of the Japanese Empire.

...