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It was the first welcome of a foreign leader to the Biden White House. The Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, sat down with President Biden to discuss regional security and threats to that security from one of Japan's neighbors.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We are committed to working together to take on the challenges from China and on issues like the East China Sea, the South China Sea, as well as North Korea, to ensure a future of a free and open Indo-Pacific.
ELLIOTT: We're joined now by NPR's Anthony Kuhn from Seoul. Anthony, it looks like China loomed large in this meeting.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Very large. And that just underlines how enlisting U.S. allies to meet China's challenge to U.S. dominance in the region is a top foreign policy priority for Biden.
But Prime Minister Suga also said that it's necessary to engage in frank dialogue with China. And that tells us that Japan is clearly not willing to side with the U.S. against China so completely that it wrecks ties between Tokyo and Beijing. They don't want to become China's enemy. They don't want to decouple their economies.
ELLIOTT: What else was on the agenda between the two leaders?
KUHN: They talked about areas of competition with China, such as cooperating on emerging technologies, which China wants to master, such as artificial intelligence. But they also talked about things where they could actually potentially cooperate with China, such as climate change and clean energy, getting vaccines to the region and also the Tokyo Olympics this summer, which is touch-and-go right now due to the pandemic.
ELLIOTT: Anthony, what does this first meeting tell us in general?
KUHN: It tells us that the Biden administration has made a start in enlisting Japan's help with China and reassuring another ally which has been unnerved by how President Trump treated allies. It also shows that there's still a very big gap in the two countries' perceptions of threats and interests in Asia.
Now, the U.S.'s next step is going to be to try to get South Korea on board. And South Korea's president, Moon Jae-in, will visit Washington next month. And it's going to be a long shot to get them fully on board with U.S. China policy. But the failure to do that would leave a gaping hole in the U.S.'s strategy in Asia.
ELLIOTT: NPR's Anthony Kuhn in Seoul, South Korea, thanks so much.
KUHN: Thank you.
