“We’re going to lose an important source of information-sharing between our two allies at a very dangerous time,” said Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.
Mr. Panda said that South Korea was fundamentally re-evaluating its relationship with Japan. “I think the two countries can be fairly described as adversaries now,” said Mr. Panda. He added: “In Seoul, the idea is if we can do something that will hurt Japan more than it will hurt us, then it’s worth doing.”
Negotiating the intelligence-sharing agreement in the first place “was such a process to get in that it’s hard to imagine any South Korean government having an easy time getting back in, certainly not in the foreseeable future,” said Tobias Harris, an analyst of Japanese politics and economics at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk advisory firm.
The withdrawal, he said, will “foreclose the option of deepening political and security ties for a long time to come.”
Under the agreement, known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement, Japan and South Korea exchange sensitive military intelligence, such as tracking data about North Korea’s missile launches, rather than going through Washington, which has separate intelligence-sharing deals with both nations.
Japan monitors North Korea with satellites, radar and surveillance aircraft, while South Korea’s geographical proximity and its intelligence-gathering on North Korea through spies, defectors and other human sources make its information valuable.
South Korea’s relations with Japan soured late last year when President Moon Jae-in’s government took steps to effectively nullify a 2015 agreement his conservative predecessor had reached with Tokyo over the so-called comfort women, Korean women and girls who were forced or lured into brothels for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The 2015 deal was meant to lay that painful issue to rest, and Japan accused Mr. Moon of tearing the wounds open again.
Source : Nytimes
