President Joe Biden and PM Yoshihide Suga agree US and Japan will work together on 5G to compete with China

U.S. President Joe Biden Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga promised Friday for his first in-person summit to work together on the quick development of 5G communications technologies to keep one of China’s leading organizations from dominating the global market, a symbolic first move at supporting an alliance that shriveled during the Trump administration.

President Joe Biden on Friday gets Japan’s PM for his first in-person summit, with the leaders expected to declare a $2 billion 5G activity as part of a coordinated US push to compete with China.

Joe Biden’s decision to welcome Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as his first guest – with South Korean President Moon Jae-in set to come in May – reflects his renewed priority on US alliances as he focuses on a rising China as America’s most pressing challenge.

The agreement came as one of the prenegotiated results of the first in-person visit of a foreign leader to Mr. Joe Biden’s White House, following three months in which he conversed with his abroad partners simply by phone or video conference. For Mr. Yoshihide Suga, simply showing up with Mr. Biden in the Rose Garden — where the president at first and erroneously called him “Yosi” rather than “Yoshi” — was proof that he had managed to preserve Japan’s most significant international relationship despite one of the most troublesome presidential transitions in history.

“Our commitment to meet in person is indicative of the importance, the value we both place on this relationship,” Mr. Joe Biden said. “We’re going to work together to prove that democracies can still compete and win in the 21st century.”

In any case, the subtext of the meeting was reacting to China’s impact and its aggressive activities in the Indo-Pacific and beyond — which Mr. Joe Biden sees as one of the key challenges of his time in office.

Also, it was a careful dance, with Japanese authorities careful about being brought into the tensions with Beijing over Taiwan, the South China Sea and the quick split between the West’s open internet and a Chinese government-dominated shut one.

So at a moment that Mr. Joe Biden has been drawing lines in the sand — promising to rival the Chinese government where he can and stand up to it where he should — Mr. Yoshihide Suga was, obviously, attempting to water down any sense of contention.

A senior US official said that technology leader Japan would declare a “very substantial commitment” of $2 billion in partnership with the United States “to work on 5G and next steps beyond.”

Mr. Joe Biden said that the two nations would “work together across a range of fields,” including “promoting secure and reliable 5G networks,” a technology that vows to reform the speed and utility of high-speed cellular connections in factories and hard-to-reach rural areas.

It is likewise a technology in which the United States has been virtually missing, while one of Beijing’s leading organizations, Huawei, with help from the Chinese government, has wired huge parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Mr. Joe Biden’s counsels have cautioned that if the United States doesn’t connect with partners in a competition to make up for lost time, the outcomes could be terrible for national security: More and a greater amount of the world’s internet traffic and discussions will flow through circuits controlled by Beijing.

Associates said that Japan and the United States would spend $2 billion on a joint project to create substitute methodologies — an exceptional shift from the 1980s when they viewed each other as powerful technological adversaries.

“Japan and the United States are both deeply invested in innovation and looking to the future,” Mr. Joe Biden said. “That includes making sure we invest in and protect the technologies that will maintain and sharpen our competitive edge, and that those technologies are governed by shared democratic norms that we both share — norms set by democracies, not autocracies.”

Obviously, Mr. Yoshihide Suga adhered cautiously to his script when he discussed “China’s influence,” saying “we agreed to oppose any attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion in the East and South China Seas and the intimidation of others in the region.”

Later, Mr. Yoshihide Suga made a single, direct reference to Taiwan, when the democratic island, actually thought to be a rebel territory by Beijing, has been buzzed over and again by Chinese warplanes.

China’s Huawei has taken an early predominance in fifth-generation internet 5G, which is becoming an inexorably critical part of the global economy, regardless of weighty US tension on the organization, which Washington contends presents dangers to security and privacy in the democratic world.

The authority said Joe Biden will likewise speak to Japan about its environment objectives as the US plans to hold a virtual summit on climate change one week from now.

Also, the authority said they will discuss developing pressures over Taiwan as the island has revealed developing infiltration of its airspace by Beijing, which claims the self-governing democracy.

Giving no warnings to China, he basically said the two leaders agreed to “the importance of peace and stability” of the Taiwan Strait. It was language that appeared to be purposely drawn from 52 years prior, when President Richard M. Nixon and Prime Minister Eisaku Sato gave a statement wherein the Japanese leader said that “the maintenance of peace and security in the Taiwan area was also important for peace and security of Japan.”

As the two leaders fielded questions from reporters, Mr. Joe Biden was gotten some information about gun control after another mass shooting that left eight dead at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.

Prior in the day, Mr. Yoshihide Suga — whose nation boycotts keeping almost all guns and reports probably the least rates of gun crime in the world — communicated his sympathies. In the Rose Garden, he stood quietly as the president called for a restriction on attack weapons.

Mr. Yoshihide Suga at that point fielded a domestic question, on the matter of whether Japan would cancel the Olympic Games this year, planned to be held in Tokyo in July, when numerous public health experts have contended there is no protected approach forward given the Covid.

“I told the president about my determination to realize the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer as a symbol of global unity,” Mr. Suga said. “President Biden once again expressed his support for this determination.”

The Biden administration has additionally been pressing the Japanese government to remain with the United States in declaring new greenhouse gas emissions pledges, to arrive at an objective of net zero emissions by 2050. As indicated by two administration authorities, the White House has pushed Japan to cut emissions in half from 2013 levels before the decade’s over.

Authorities had trusted that Japan on Friday would declare a finish to funding the improvement of coal plants abroad, yet Mr. Yoshihide Suga unveiled no such public commitment.

“Neither country is seeking to raise tensions or to provoke China, but at the same time we’re trying to send a clear signal that some of the steps that China is taking,” the official said, are “antithetical to the mission of maintaining peace and stability.”

While the circumstance was circumstantial, the authority said it was appropriate that Yoshihide Suga was visiting two days after Joe Biden settled on the momentous decision to pull out from Afghanistan following 20 years, finishing the longest-ever US war.

The pullout will “free up time and attention and resources from our senior leadership and our military to focus on what we believe are the fundamental challenges in the 21st century and they lie fundamentally in the Indo-Pacific,” the authority said.

“The United States can only be effective in Asia when the US-Japan relationship is strong and Japan is steady and stable,” he said.

Yoshihide Suga in September succeeded his partner Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving PM, who was one of the few democratic partners to figure out how to save stable relations with Biden’s unstable predecessor Donald Trump.

Joe Biden’s inaugural summit – held a bizarrely late three months into his term because of the Covid-19 pandemic – is required to be a manageable affair after the Trump period, with the president inviting the soft-spoken Japanese leader for one-on-one talks and an extended meeting with the cabinet before a joint news conference.

Yet, Yoshihide Suga, who Japanese media revealed showed up in Washington Thursday evening, is relied upon to dismiss becoming an overenthusiastic supporter of the US line on China, which stays the fundamental top trading partner for resource-scarce Japan.

Tokyo since Abe’s time has attempted to settle relations with Beijing and not joined Washington in sanctions over rights worries in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

“The Biden administration, I think, is concerned at how aggressive China has been and how much ground the US has lost in recent years in Asia and wants to catch up quickly,” said Michael Green, who was the top Asia counselor to previous president George W. Shrub and is currently senior VP at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I think the Japanese view is that they have had a strategy in place and they want to move forward steady as she goes,” he said.

“So there’s a bit of a nuanced difference in public tone but not in direction,” he said.

In any case, Japan will invite what is relied upon to be a new affirmation that the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands – where Beijing, which calls them the Diaoyu, has been progressively assertive – fall under the US-Japan security deal that requires mutual defense.

Yoshihide Suga, and Moon next month, will likewise counsel Joe Biden as he reviews US policy on North Korea, where Trump’s surprising personal diplomacy with leader Kim Jong Un facilitated pressures yet didn’t bring a lasting accord on Pyongyang’s nuclear program.