On its face, Joe Biden’s trip to East Asia this week was a fairly typical international tour by a U.S. president. After visiting South Korea and meeting its new president, Biden went to Japan for a similar set of meetings with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials.
Much of the language emanating from Biden’s trip has been boilerplate about U.S. partnerships: working hand-in-hand, shared values, ironclad alliances and so on.
Except that after four years of alliance management chaos under former U.S. President Donald Trump, such language and consideration are a change. Trump threatened to wreck American alliances in East Asia, particularly with South Korea. So Biden’s first stop was there to restore that partnership with the South’s new president, Yoon Suk-yeol. The main issues were North Korea and China.