Biden and Suga agree US and Japan will work together on 5G

President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan pledged Friday to work jointly on the rapid development of 5G communications technologies to prevent one of China’s leading companies from dominating the global market, a symbolic first move at shoring up an alliance that withered during the Trump administration.

The agreement came as one of the pre-negotiated outcomes of the first in-person visit of a foreign leader to Biden’s White House, after three months in which he talked to his overseas counterparts only by phone or video conference. For Suga, just appearing with Biden in the Rose Garden was evidence that he had managed to preserve Japan’s most important international relationship despite one of the most difficult presidential transitions in history.

“Our commitment to meet in person is indicative of the importance, the value we both place on this relationship,” Biden said. “We’re going to work together to prove that democracies can still compete and win in the 21st century.”

Read | US, Japan show united front on China in Biden's first summit

But the subtext of the meeting was responding to China’s influence and its aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific and beyond — which Biden regards as one of the key challenges 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’s open internet and a Chinese government-dominated closed one.

Biden said that the two countries would “work together across a range of fields,” including “promoting secure and reliable 5G networks,” a technology that promises to revolutionize the speed and utility of high-speed cellular connections in 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’s leading companies, Huawei, with support from the Chinese government, has wired vast parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

Biden’s 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’s internet traffic and conversations will flow through circuits controlled by Beijing. Aides said that Japan and the United States would spend $2 billion on a joint project to develop alternate approaches — a remarkable shift from the 1980s, when they regarded each other as potent technological rivals.