Tools for Trilateralism: Improving U.S.-Japan-Korea Cooperation to Manage Complex Contingencies

One of the more successful innovations of the last six years in the area of U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean alliance management has been the establishment and use of the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group for developing common policies toward North Korea. This book examines how the TCOG process can and should be strengthened and expanded (or simply copied) to encourage trilateral coordination beyond that of North Korean policy and, by means of such coordination, to strengthen the two bilateral alliances. In this collaborative effort, U.S., Japanese, and South Korean scholars conducted dozens of interviews with past and current policymakers and identify crisis contingency planning and response as providing important opportunities to enhance trilateral cooperation. The book also includes a report of a simulated joint crisis management planning exercise.