“Over a two and a half day period I had to pinch myself at how exciting it was to see bonds being created before my eyes, a potential for a new kind of relationship that would change the contours, not just of Asia but the world,” he said.
Campbell also emphasised the critical need for public officials to understand how technology works. “Technology is at the core of what each of our governments seek to do.”
“Every week I’m in a meeting with senior people making decisions about technologies they neither understand [nor] really could identify. And so we don’t want that to be the case for your generation,” he said to the fellows.
In recent years, rifts between the countries have gradually eased. Last March, Japan agreed to loosen restrictions on chip material exports to South Korea ahead of a bilateral summit in May of that year.
The tech training programme is only one of several trilateral initiatives that arose from Camp David. Others include a cancer dialogue, youth summit, early-warning system for supply-chain disruptions and a maritime mechanism to synchronise capacity building in Southeast Asia and Pacific Island countries.
Sessions will be led by Johns Hopkins faculty as well as members of the policy and tech communities, with the first two weeks of programming held in the US capital and the final week in Silicon Valley, California.
“Bringing together public policy officials from three major trans-Pacific, like-minded countries … to learn, discuss, collaborate and cooperate on the social implementation and governance of advanced technologies is significant”, said Shigehiro Tanaka of the NEC Corporation in a statement.
Last week, Japan’s ambassador to the US, Shigeo Yamada, said that the biggest benefit of mini-laterals was that they enabled a focus on strategic issues.
“When we meet bilaterally, we tend to talk about bilateral issues: economic issues, development assistance and so forth. But when we have other partners in the room, we don’t talk about those bilateral issues, but focus on strategic issues,” he said in remarks at the Washington-based Centre for a New American Security.
At a meeting with his Japanese and Korean counterparts in Virginia in May, Campbell said another leaders’ summit between the three countries was a “high priority for the remainder of the year”.