Last week, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, despite the opposition of her country's closest ally, the United States, stood together with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square to watch the military parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of World War II's end in Asia. The decision provided the most visible image yet of an emerging China-South Korea alliance, one that China believes may prevent the region from sliding into a cold war.
The region's other major actors — the U.S., Japan and even North Korea — look on this blossoming friendship with considerable dread. The U.S. worries that China is driving a wedge between its strongest Asian allies, South Korea and Japan, undermining America's capacity to offset China's rising military power.
Likewise, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is concerned that his country's closest neighbor is drifting into China's orbit. And, indeed, Park has consistently spurned Abe by refusing to hold a bilateral summit with him, in protest over Japan's alleged historical revisionism, particularly with regard to the Korean "comfort women" who served as sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.