The trilateral Northeast Asian summit will meet for the first time since 2015, with a focus on North Korea.
On Wednesday next week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will host South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for the seventh Japan-China-South Korea trilateral summit. Abe confirmed the summit, which had been expected since late-2017, during a visit to Amman, Jordan.
The agenda of the meeting will encompass regional issues, with ongoing diplomatic engagement with North Korea high on the agenda. The meeting will take place within two weeks of Moon’s historic summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Abe described a more open-ended agenda in Amman, noting that “all aspects of the future development of relationships between Japan and China, and Japan and South Korea” would be on the table at the meeting.
Next week’s meeting will serve as an important opportunity for Tokyo to take the diplomatic initiative amid accelerating inter-Korean and China-North Korea diplomacy earlier this year. Abe recently traveled to the United States to meet with U. S. President Donald J. Trump to discuss North Korea as well.
But the trilateral summit will be an opportunity to discuss broader issues as well.
