{"id":60956,"date":"2021-04-17T16:18:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T20:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=60956"},"modified":"2021-04-17T16:18:08","modified_gmt":"2021-04-17T20:18:08","slug":"biden-goes-full-bore-concerning-5g-collaboration-with-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=60956","title":{"rendered":"Biden Goes Full Bore Concerning 5G Collaboration with Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biden and Suga Agree U.S. and Japan Will Work Together on 5G<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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The subtext of the meeting was responding to China\u2019s influence and its aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga resisted being drawn into a rivalry.<\/h3>\n

By David E. Sanger and Katie Rogers
\nThe New York Times<\/p>\n

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WASHINGTON \u2014 President Biden and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan pledged on Friday to work jointly on the rapid development of 5G communications technologies to prevent one of China\u2019s leading companies from dominating the global market, a symbolic first move at shoring up an alliance that withered during the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

The agreement came as one of the prenegotiated outcomes of the first in-person visit of a foreign leader to Mr. Biden\u2019s White House, after three months in which he talked to his overseas counterparts only by phone or video conference. For Mr. Suga, just appearing with Mr. Biden in the Rose Garden \u2014 where the president initially and mistakenly called him \u201cYosi\u201d instead of \u201cYoshi\u201d \u2014 was evidence that he had managed to preserve Japan\u2019s most important international relationship despite one of the most difficult presidential transitions in history.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur commitment to meet in person is indicative of the importance, the value we both place on this relationship,\u201d Mr. Biden said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to work together to prove that democracies can still compete and win in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the subtext of the meeting was responding to China\u2019s influence and its aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific and beyond \u2014 which Mr. Biden regards as\u00a0one of the key challenges<\/a> of his time in office. And it was a careful dance, with Japanese officials wary of being drawn into the tensions with Beijing over Taiwan, the South China Sea and the rapid split between the West\u2019s open internet and a Chinese government-dominated closed one.<\/p>\n

So at a moment that Mr. Biden has been drawing lines in the sand \u2014 promising to compete with the Chinese government where he can and confront it where he must \u2014 Mr. Suga was, unsurprisingly, trying to water down any sense of rivalry.<\/p>\n

Mr. Biden said that the two countries would \u201cwork together across a range of fields,\u201d including \u201cpromoting secure and reliable 5G networks,\u201d a technology that promises to revolutionize the speed and utility of high-speed cellular connections<\/a>\u00a0in factories and hard-to-reach rural areas. It is also a technology in which the United States has been virtually absent, while one of Beijing\u2019s leading companies, Huawei, with support from the Chinese government, has wired vast parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr. Biden\u2019s advisers have warned that if the United States does not engage allies in a race to catch up, the results could be disastrous for national security: More and more of the world\u2019s\u00a0internet traffic and conversations will flow through circuits controlled by Beijing.<\/a> Aides said that Japan and the United States would spend $2 billion on a joint project to develop alternate approaches \u2014 a remarkable shift from the 1980s, when they regarded each other as potent technological rivals.<\/p>\n

\u201cJapan and the United States are both deeply invested in innovation and looking to the future,\u201d Mr. Biden said. \u201cThat 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 \u2014 norms set by democracies, not autocracies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Suga stuck carefully to his script when he talked about \u201cChina\u2019s influence,\u201d saying \u201cwe 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.\u201d Later, Mr. Suga made a single, direct reference to Taiwan, at a time when the democratic island, still considered a rogue province by Beijing, has been\u00a0buzzed repeatedly by Chinese warplanes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Issuing no warnings to China, he simply said the two leaders agreed to \u201cthe importance of peace and stability\u201d of the Taiwan Strait. It was language that seemed deliberately drawn from 52 years ago, when President Richard M. Nixon and Prime Minister Eisaku Sato\u00a0issued a statement<\/a> in which the Japanese leader said that \u201cthe maintenance of peace and security in the Taiwan area was also important for peace and security of Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Image<\/span>\"Mr.<\/picture><\/div>
Mr. Biden meeting with Mr. Suga of Japan at the White House on Friday.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>Doug Mills\/The New York Times<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As the two leaders fielded questions from reporters, Mr. Biden was asked about gun control after another\u00a0mass shooting that left eight dead<\/a>\u00a0at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Earlier in the day, Mr. Suga \u2014 whose country bans keeping almost all guns and reports some of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world \u2014 expressed his condolences. In the Rose Garden, he stood silently as the president called for a ban on assault weapons.<\/p>\n

Mr. Suga then fielded a domestic question of his own, on the matter of whether Japan would cancel the Olympic Games this year, scheduled to be held in Tokyo in July, when many public health experts have argued there is no safe way to go forward given the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told the president about my determination to realize the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer as a symbol of the global unity,\u201d Mr. Suga said. \u201cPresident Biden once again expressed his support for this determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Biden administration has also been pressing the Japanese government to stand with the United States in announcing new greenhouse gas emissions pledges, to reach a goal of\u00a0net zero emissions<\/a>\u00a0by 2050. According to two administration officials, the White House has prodded Japan to cut emissions in half from 2013 levels by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n

Officials had hoped that Japan on Friday would announce an end to funding the development of coal plants overseas, but Mr. Suga made no such public commitment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is \u201cThe Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0@<\/span>SangerNYT<\/a>\u00a0\u2022<\/span>\u00a0Facebook<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent in the Washington bureau.\u00a0@<\/span>katierogers<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nhttps:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/04\/16\/us\/politics\/biden-5g-japan.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biden and Suga Agree U.S. and Japan Will Work Together on 5G<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}