A summit the United States will host this week with Japan and South Korea is expected to yield an agreement to set up a hotline for urgent communications between the leaders of the three countries, a senior White House official said Wednesday.
The plan will be announced Friday as part of "a very ambitious set of initiatives that seek to lock in trilateral engagement, both now and into the future," according to Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the U.S. National Security Council.
"We're going to invest in technology to have a three-way hotline for the leaders and others inside their governments to communicate" in critical circumstances, Campbell said at a Brookings Institution event.
He said a major objective for the first standalone summit between the three nations, to be hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden at his Camp David retreat near Washington, will be to make trilateral cooperation "much broader, deeper (and) thicker" by taking steps that will prevent current progress from being reversed in the future.
Senior U.S. officials have said that Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will agree to expand their cooperation to a wide spectrum of areas, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence and education, as well as development assistance in other parts of the Indo-Pacific region.
In addressing security among other points, the leaders are expected to agree to conduct joint exercises of the three countries' armed forces more frequently and share real-time information about North Korea's missile launches.
Campbell said the leaders are also set to discuss the situation in Ukraine and the need to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, while showing the world that this three-way cooperation will be "critical for the infrastructure and the architecture of the Indo-Pacific going forward."
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