US, Japan, South Korea vow to step up joint work against North
The United States and its allies, Japan and South Korea, vow to step up their cooperation against North Korea, which has escalated its muscle-flexing in response to the allies' provocations.
The allied countries made the pledge in a joint statement issued after a trilateral meeting, held in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit on Sunday, between US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.
The three states hailed "the unprecedented level of trilateral coordination" they had achieved, vowing to forge even closer ties, especially in the military sphere.
Biden also underscored the "ironclad" US commitment to "defend" both allies, the statement said.
"We face real challenges, but our countries are more aligned than ever, more prepared to take on those challenges than ever," the American president noted separately after the three-way meeting. "So I look forward to deepening the bonds of cooperation between our three countries," he added.
The developments come against the backdrop of extended war games featuring the US and the South. Codenamed Vigilant Storm, the drills enlisted nearly 240 warplanes conducting about 1,600 sorties. The US Air Force has boasted that the exercises were unprecedented in their sheer scale.
North Korea considers the drills to be an exercise for a pending invasion, and has been conducting a flurry of back-to-back missile launches, artillery fire drills, and aerial exercises since the beginning of this year.
Pyongyang justified the missile tests as a "countermeasure" against the joint US-South Korea war games, with North Korean state media publishing statements from the military condemning the "enemy's war drills" and demanding them to be halted.
North Korea, meanwhile, maintains that it will not tolerate persisting US-led war games in the area, underlining that it will continue responding to the joint military maneuvers by holding its own drills as well as developing and testing all sorts of weaponry, including missiles that could reach as far as the US mainland.
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