Ties between Tokyo and Seoul are showing signs of improvement, albeit in incremental steps, with the two countries holding a rare trilateral missile defense drill with the U.S. a day after South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol spoke of the need to "swiftly" repair the bilateral relationship.
The three countries’ navies held the drill from Aug. 8 through Sunday during the multinational Pacific Dragon exercise off the coast of the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii, with the participants sharing “tactical data link information in accordance with a trilateral information sharing agreement,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.
Defense chiefs from the three nations had announced the exercise plans during a trilateral meeting in Singapore in June that highlighted the growing threat from North Korea’s nuclear and missile development. The last known iteration of the trilateral exercise came in December 2017.