A Perspective from Australia

Amid a proliferation of new minilateral groupings in the Indo-Pacific, there is fresh momentum building behind a new arrangement: a trilateral featuring Australia, Japan and South Korea. On paper, the three countries are natural partners: all US allies, all market economies, all influential regional powers with a stake in a prosperous and stable regional strategic order. To date, however, these countries have largely pursued cooperation with one another at the bilateral level or trilaterally with the United States. This has been due to a combination of factors, including a relatively benign strategic environment, political tensions between Japan and South Korea, differing strategic priorities, and incentives to compete rather than cooperate in regional development and economics.

These calculations, however, are beginning to change. From an Australian perspective, there are new incentives for the three countries to collaborate amongst themselves in a more intentional manner in a period where the Indo-Pacific regional order is in a state of flux. Indeed, there have already been important signs of intent from the three countries to establish a baseline for more purposeful trilateral cooperation, including the first ever trilateral defence ministers’ meeting during the 2024 Shangri-La Dialogue, and the inaugural Australia-Japan-Republic of Korea 1.5 Track Dialogue for Future Oriented Cooperation hosted by the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia in June 2024.¹

For Australia, however, this enthusiasm is accompanied by a clear-eyed assessment that such a grouping will need to prioritize function over form and to set realistic near-term objectives in order to deliver tangible value for all three countries. To avoid trilateralism for its own sake, Australia would prefer for this new grouping to focus initially on prioritizing the coordination and harmonization of each country’s existing regional order-building initiatives, rather than prematurely creating new initiatives. Rather than prioritizing defence cooperation—a naturally attractive but ultimately limited vector for valuable trilateral engagement—they ought to do so by focusing on regional capacity-building and development assistance, areas where the three countries’ shared interests and comparative strengths are most engaged.

Why the ROK and Japan Matter to Australia

Australia’s strategic partnerships with Japan and South Korea have rarely been more important. Indeed, Canberra is seeking to upgrade and outfit both relationships to meet the needs of a new strategic era in the Indo-Pacific. For instance, it is expanding the number of ministerial mechanisms across both bilateral relationships, with annual or biennial defense and foreign ministers’ meetings now accompanied by relatively new economic security dialogues.² Beyond well-established two-way trade relationships, particularly as consumers of Australia’s vast reserves of natural resources, Japan and Korea are also key partners for Australia’s trading future as partners in its clean energy transition. It is no coincidence, for example, that Australia’s 2023 National Hydrogen Strategy was published in three languages: English, Japanese, and Korean.³ Australia is also seeking to broaden the remit of its defense cooperation with both countries, inviting Japanese and South Korean forces to participate in successive editions of the major Talisman Sabre and Pitch Black military exercises,⁴ and exploring new opportunities for defence industrial and technology collaboration with both partners.⁵ Seoul and Tokyo are also key partners for Canberra in regional and global governance. This includes regular and coordinated engagement through regional institutions like the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit, as well as collaboration to shape the agendas of the expanded G7 arrangement, the G20, and the Indo-Pacific 4 grouping at NATO.⁶

The Logic of Trilateralism for Australia

While Australia has developed increasingly robust strategic partnerships with both Japan and South Korea individually, it has also coordinated with both countries on specific regional issues, albeit on an ad-hoc basis. However, amid a rapidly shifting set of strategic circumstances, there are compelling reasons for Canberra to consider formalizing such cooperation in a new dedicated trilateral forum.

Managing Great Power Relations

Firstly, Japan and Korea are particularly attractive minilateral partners for Australia in managing their respective and collective relationships with the United States and China. From Australia’s perspective, Japan and South Korea are uniquely attractive partners given their own close alliance relationships with the United States. This is in large part due to the mutually reinforcing effect that trilateral cooperation would have vis-à-vis developments in these respective alliance agendas. Indeed, recent bilateral joint statements between the three countries have each situated Australia-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation in the context of “strengthening of our respective alliances with the United States.”⁷ However, while Australia continues to support an enduring US military presence in the region through a suite of alliance force posture and defense industrial initiatives, it also continues to encourage Washington to redouble its efforts to make more consistent investments in the region’s own priorities, particularly in “development, connectivity, digital trade and the energy transition.”⁸ Crucially, Canberra seeks to work with other US allies and partners to reinforce that message and to shape Washington’s approaches to non-military issues in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

In that context, there is a distinct value to trilateralism in coordinating efforts to shape US strategy. Indeed, seasoned US Asia watchers have referred to this grouping as “the real China hands,” arguing that Washington should “should increasingly take its cues from Australia, Japan, and South Korea” ⁹ given the allies’ deep experience in managing often complex but enduring relationships with Beijing, and with real intellectual capital behind many of the strategic initiatives and policy decisions made by the Biden administration over the last four years.¹⁰ Though the three countries have a history of coordinating their efforts to influence US Asia policy on an ad-hoc basis,¹⁰ establishing a trilateral mechanism to share assessments of US politics and regional strategy would only serve to formalize and enhance those latent efforts.

Importantly, however, Australia, Japan, and South Korea have shown that they are also prepared to work together inside the forces or institutions driving regional change without the United States.¹² While all three countries seek to preserve elements of the status quo through cooperation with Washington across a range of metrics, they also concur that the objective of preserving their favorable strategic circumstances is best met through actively shaping, not simply preserving, key elements of the regional order from within.¹³ This is most readily observable in the trade domain, where the three countries are already members of the China-headed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), even as they engage with the United States’ own regional trade mechanism, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Australia and Japan are also members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), while Australia and Korea are each members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

All three countries are well-placed to share lessons and strategies for managing Beijing’s coercive behavior in the economic and military domains. Here, each country has recent high-profile experiences to draw on. Australia has experienced several unprofessional encounters with Chinese military assets in recent years, including while operating with Japanese and South Korean forces in the Yellow Sea and East Sea/Sea of Japan, respectively.¹⁴ Meanwhile, Canberra has successfully weathered a prolonged campaign of Chinese economic coercion by Beijing, launched in retaliation against Australia’s call for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, thanks in large part to a doubling of Japanese and South Korean purchases of Australian export goods.¹⁵

Tokyo famously endured a rare earth trade ban in 2010 after a collision between a Chinese fishing vessel and Japan Coast Guard ship,¹⁶ and continues to experience near-daily incursions by Chinese civilian, coast guard, and military assets into the seas and skies surrounding the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which Tokyo administers.¹⁷ Though relatively low profile, South Korea is likewise dealing with regular incursions by Chinese civilian and military vessels into its territorial waters in the Yellow Sea,¹⁸ and continues to endure the aftereffects of Beijing’s unofficial sanctions campaign after the deployment of the US operated Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system in 2017.¹⁹ Notably, since 2019, China has also conducted multiple joint air and sea patrols with Russia, which have probed Japanese or Korean oceans and skies, often with the objective of driving political wedges between Seoul and Tokyo over disputed territories.²⁰ A dedicated trilateral forum could provide a valuable mechanism for the three countries to share information on changing patterns of adversarial behavior, the operational challenges encountered in the face of those activities, and fluctuations in strategic risks in an increasingly volatile regional environment, as well as to coordinate their efforts to shape US approaches to China policy in turn.²¹

A Multipolar Strategic Order

Closer collaboration with Japan and South Korea is appealing to Australia given the importance it places on building effective bilateral and minilateral strategic partnerships in an increasingly multipolar order. Australia’s 2024 National Defence Strategy argued that in an increasingly contested strategic environment where US power is in relative decline while Chinese power is growing, it has become all the more important for Australia to work with capable partners that “are prepared to strengthen cooperation in support of shared interests.”²² Importantly, this goes beyond augmenting the US-Australia alliance. Indeed, Australia regards its strategic partnerships with Japan and South Korea as essential to its efforts to achieve a “strategic equilibrium” in the region—a balance of power where no one nation is dominant, and where multiple regional actors have the capacity and willingness to exercise their agency in upholding a stable and prosperous region.²³

It is this same logic which drives Australia’s participation in a wider array of regional minilateral groupings including AUKUS, the Quad, and the Australia-Japan-United States Trilateral Strategic Dialogue. For Canberra, these groupings serve to amplify the shared strategic preferences between its members and likeminded partners, as well as force-multipliers for Australia’s own capabilities and resources across a range of metrics. Importantly, each of these minilaterals is not intended to function as an “alliance” in the traditional sense of the term, but to support the pursuit of larger shared strategic objectives—for Australia, maintaining “a favorable regional strategic balance”—through targeted cooperation in specific areas including maritime security, development assistance, defence capability and technology development, and so forth.²⁴ By that same logic, there is no reason that a grouping between Australia, Japan, and South Korea—appropriately focused and calibrated—could not serve a similar function.

For Australia, Japan and South Korea figure as increasingly important partners in a multipolar regional order given their pursuit of more active brands of foreign policy and their projected relative power over the mid- to long-term.²⁵ Indeed, both countries appear to share Australia’s preference for pursuing collective approaches to shared challenges. South Korea’s 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy contains a commitment to regional order-building beyond Seoul’s traditional focus on Northeast Asian strategic issues, and clearly recognizes the need to cultivate “a network of strategic partnerships,” including with Japan and Australia, in the support of “collective efforts to find common solutions to a range of complex challenges.”²⁶ Likewise, Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy similarly pivots on strengthening “mutually complementary efforts” with strategic partners including Australia and South Korea in the interests of creating a favorable, peaceful regional order amid a shifting balance of power.²⁷

Coordination over Cooperation, Development over Defence

From Australia’s perspective, there is a clear logic to enhanced trilateral coordination with Japan and South Korea. Yet as a middle power that seeks to achieve an ambitious set of strategic objectives with limited national resources, it is critical that the minilateral initiatives into which Australia chooses to invest its financial, human, and political resources deliver tangible results, play to collective interests and relative strengths, and are not needlessly duplicative. This will be a particularly important consideration in a context where Japan and Korea may often be able to bring far greater resources to bear against any given initiative or priority but may not share Australia’s relative interest in that issue. In that respect, managing expectations around resource allocation against national versus shared priorities will be crucial if the trilateral is not to fall afoul of its own great expectations.

In that respect, Australia’s near-term approach to trilateral cooperation with Japan and South Korea will likely be marked by two overarching characteristics: a primary focus on non-military forms of regional order-building cooperation in development assistance and capacity-building, rather than defense cooperation; and a preference for coordinating, deconflicting, and operationalizing initiatives and resources that the three countries already possess, rather than creating new trilateral initiatives. While Australia’s approach may change once the trilateral is a proven concept, a near-term approach which prioritizes coordinating different capacity-building and development assistance would be the most useful means for this grouping to influence regional alignment dynamics and achieve shared strategic objectives.

The Limited Value of Defense Cooperation

Firstly, Australia’s own interests in the trilateral would be most engaged by coordination and, where possible, cooperation on regional development and capacity-building initiatives, rather than on defense and security cooperation. Operationalizing defense and security issues would seem like a natural starting point for the three countries, given their respective military alliances with the United States and their participation in a growing roster of high-end military exercises. Most recently, this included the participation of large Japanese and South Korean contingents in the premier US-Australia Exercise Talisman Sabre last year.²⁸ Indeed, all three countries share a deep interest in facilitating an enduring US military presence in Asia, and have sought to do so through expanding and modernizing their respective alliances through force posture augmentation and new defense industrial initiatives, as well as through their own respective trilateral arrangements. Were the political appetite to exist, the three countries could conceivably seek to operationalize Exercise Pacific Vanguard—an annual Australia-Japan-Korea-US naval exercise focused on anti-submarine warfare—as a new maritime security-focused minilateral grouping with explicit US membership.²⁹

In reality, however, the utility of engaging on this issue set in a forum without the United States is limited. Though all three countries would likely feature in conceivable major regional or cross-regional crisis situations, there are few—if any—imaginable regional contingencies where Australia would see itself fighting alongside Japan and South Korea without the United States. Rather than a basis for operationalizing collective action, a trilateral might have more utility as an input into strategic planning and thinking through the specifics of geographical and operational divisions of labor. Indeed, in the context of growing China-North Korea-Russia military cooperation in Asia and Europe, policy thinkers in the three countries increasingly share a view that many conceivable major conflict scenarios in the region would likely see flashpoints erupt across some combination of the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and in the East or South China Sea simultaneously or in quick succession. Recent regional strategy simulations featuring Australia, Japanese, and Korean experts attended by the author suggest that all three countries, faced with proximate threats and limited military resources, would be easily stretched in a multi-pronged regional crisis and would likely prioritize their immediate flashpoints of interest when forced to choose.³⁰

In that respect, a trilateral mechanism between Australia, Japan, and South Korea would look fundamentally different than the Camp David Arrangement or the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue with respect to security. On balance, it would seem to add little operational value without the inclusion of the United States. Yet given the extent of the three countries’ shared interests in regional security and stability, and the role of the United States in the pursuit of that objective, the trilateral could be a useful mechanism for cooperation in defense preparedness ahead of time, sharing assessments of their respective efforts to shape US regional military strategy, and for coordination and deconfliction in a regional crisis.

Coordination over Cooperation

The three countries should prioritise exploring options for cooperation on regional capacity-building and economic development initiatives, particularly those in the maritime security domain. These efforts should focus on better coordinating their respective existing lines of effort, rather than developing brand new trilateral initiatives. While this may seem like an undersell of the three countries’ alignment and capacity, focusing on cataloguing and deconflicting each country’s respective lines of effort across regional development, diplomatic, economic, and security indicators would be an essential first step if this trilateral were ever to realize that latent potential. These efforts would focus on deconflicting and coordinating different national initiatives intended to achieve similar political or strategic effects, such as the three countries’ respective economic and environmental initiatives in the Mekong Delta or in disaster resilience and capacity-building in the Pacific Islands.³¹ Functionally, this would involve sharing assessments of regional development and political trends of interest to inform the three countries’ shared situational awareness, and providing information on the progress on and obstacles to the implementation of national policy initiatives. Doing so would serve a force multiplying function in the pursuit of the three countries’ shared strategic interests in the region, helping to maximize the efficiency and regional value add-on of their respective initiatives, without the political or financial lift required to create new, potentially complex trilateral initiatives. Similar approaches have been proposed with respect to the maritime capacity-building efforts of the Quad, whereby the grouping would function as a “clearing house” and information-sharing mechanism for the four countries’ respective efforts.³²

Greater coordination at the subregional level will be especially important as all three countries look to enhance their value with countries which often struggle to absorb overcapacities. In that respect, such an approach would be beneficial for Australia in rightsizing its approach in Southeast Asia, where Japan and South Korea enjoy comparative advantages in terms of their regional networks and the volume of development assistance that each country can bring to bear, and where Australia often struggles to maintain sustained and impactful engagement on development and economic issues despite the announcement of major flagship initiatives like the Southeast Asia Financing Facility.³³ Likewise, a trilateral forum would provide a mechanism through which Australia could share its comparatively deep expertise, personal connections, and information advantages in the Pacific Islands with Japan and South Korea to help right size both countries’ approaches, at a time when both countries are seeking to enhance their engagement with the Pacific Islands region at the highest levels.³⁴ Indeed, Australian policy figures have previously expressed frustration with current approaches to maritime capacity-building and development assistance, which often see extra-regional partners share information on new programs or assistance packages with Canberra only after the fact.³⁵ One place to start might be for Australia to extend an invitation to South Korea to join Japan in focused consultations on how to support or compliment Canberra’s Pacific Humanitarian Warehousing Program.³⁶

Conclusion

Enhanced trilateral cooperation with Japan and South Korea fits with Australia’s prevailing approach to regional strategy. Rightsized and appropriately calibrated, this grouping could prove a valuable source of support for the three countries’ efforts to uphold a favorable regional balance of power, manage complex great power relationships with China and the US, and advance shared wider regional order-building objectives across the Indo-Pacific. Granted, there are several factors that would seemingly militate against closer cooperation between Australia, Japan, and South Korea –differences in policy and strategic priorities, capacity and resource limitations, incentives for commercial competition over cooperation, and latent political tensions between Seoul and Tokyo. Yet there are evidently sufficient incentives in play for all three countries to explore the art of the possible—and the valuable—through this emerging minilateral grouping.