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Biden touts wider regional cooperation in meeting with South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol, avoids direct mention of China
- Joint statement from Biden and South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol said they were committed to promoting stability across the Taiwan Strait, but did not mention China
- Biden also said that any potential meeting with North Korea’s leader would depend on whether Kim Jong-un was ‘sincere’
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United States President Joe Biden said on Saturday he hoped to strengthen cooperation in Asia beyond treaty allies South Korea and Japan, as he repeated his now common expression that democratic nations needed to gird themselves against rising autocracy.
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In a joint statement following bilateral talks in Seoul with President Yoon Suk-yeol and in a press conference, the US president avoided making pointed comments about China.
He however said Washington and Seoul were committed to promoting peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait “as well as ensuring freedom of navigation including in the South China Sea and beyond”.
“There’s a sense in the Pacific, the Indo-Pacific, that there’s a need to cooperate much more closely, not just militarily but economically and politically,” Biden said in a joint press conference on Saturday afternoon following talks earlier in the day with Yoon.
“And so we talked up at some length to make this larger than just the United States, Japan and Korea, but the entire Pacific, the South Pacific and the Indo-Pacific,” he said. “You’ve heard me say it a hundred times and I am sorry to the American press for repeating it, but I really do think we are at an inflection point in world history … there is going to be a competition between democracies and autocracies, I mean that sincerely”.
He said cooperation did not have to take the form of a formal written alliance, noting how Japan and South Korea both “stepped up” to support Ukraine in its war against larger neighbour Russia.
“So there’s a whole range of things that affect whether or not democracy can be sustained in the midst of these incredible changes taking place,” he said.
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