On April 7, 2020, the Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative (ASI), housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, hosted a strategy session with a small group of top experts and officials from the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea to discuss ways forward and offer actionable, practical policy recommendations on where and how the three countries can cooperate trilaterally to lead the global response to COVID-19.
This Strategic Insights Memo, written by ASI director and senior fellow Dr. Miyeon Oh, provides four concrete recommendations for reinvigorating trilateral cooperation in the global fight against COVID-19.
Dr. Oh argues that the United States must show strong leadership, working with its allies and partners, to shape a collective global response to COVID-19, including measures to enhance global resilience, reduce economic impacts, and safeguard values and principles of the rules-based international system. Achieving this goal will be impossible without strong trilateral cooperation with its key allies Japan and Korea, as stabilized Japan-Korea relations will be essential to executing US strategy and securing US legitimacy as a global leader in the Indo-Pacific.