Expert: US isolating China with allies

The United States government's hosting of a US-Japan-Republic of Korea summit was intended "to economically and technologically isolate China", a US expert said.

"Because the way China sees what's happening in the 'Indo-Pacific' is our (the US') actions to isolate it and militarily encircle it diplomatically," Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, told China Daily in an interview.

"And therefore, we have the Quad out there with those four countries, and then we have another multilateral grouping of AUKUS countries," he said. "And now for Northeast Asia, they're trying to create this trilateral mechanism of South Korea and Japan."

The Quad and AUKUS were widely interpreted as diplomatic and military efforts targeting China's increasing international influence.

At Camp David last Friday, US President Joe Biden held a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the ROK President Yoon Suk-yeol and made commitments to consult promptly with each other during crises and coordinate responses to "regional challenges, provocations and threats affecting common interests".

Biden claimed at the news conference after the summit that the pact was not "anti-China".

Beijing said the US is leading Western countries into the "all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China".

The Camp David summit marked the first stand-alone meeting between the US and its two Asian allies, despite the historical animosity in Japan-ROK relations.

Gupta said Japan and the ROK have managed to tighten and improve their relations primarily because Yoon was "very friendly with the Japanese" and "cleaned the slate" of wartime wrongdoings of the Japanese. So, the US grabbed this "fairly rare" chance to take the trilateral relationship forward.

Gupta also said Yoon has an aggressive stance against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and so the DPRK has also "responded with a lot of ballistic missile testing".

"There's been a real deterioration of tensions in the (Korean) peninsula. And the timing of the summit is essentially geared to … enhancing deterrence at the trilateral level," Gupta said.

"But if that trilateralism is expanded beyond the peninsula into the Indo-Pacific, then that is a completely different ballgame. And that really impinges in a very significant way on Chinese interests. That's why the vagueness that the Americans have left in terms of whether this will be applicable beyond the peninsula is the issue that needs to be watched."

Gupta said it is premature to talk in terms of a historic Camp David summit now. "Because if we do have a center-left president in Seoul, we may well again see Japan and (the Republic of) Korea relations becoming tense," he said.