A high ranking White House official commended South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s recent summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. 

Kurt Campbell, Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs of the ​​​​​​​National Security Council, offered the assessment at a seminar on Thursday at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

Campbell praised Yoon’s efforts to take unilateral steps in diplomacy with Japan and welcomed the president’s act of extending an olive branch to Tokyo, a move the U.S. official described as “a courage rarely seen off and on the global stage.”

Noting that the central purpose of the meeting was the "strong deterrence and solidarity in the face of increasing North Korean provocations,” he said it went further to cover technological cooperation, regional issues and challenges while serving as a test of the waters for trilateral cooperation.
  
Expressing hopes of strengthening three-way cooperation, Campbell emphasized that it is in the strategic interest of the U.S. that Seoul-Tokyo relations improve as the "two strongest bilateral partners" of Washington.

President Yoon visited Tokyo earlier this month for a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, marking the first time in 12 years that the heads of the two nations engaged in such a summit.