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

By James L. Schoff

One of the more successful innovations in the area of U.S.-Japan and U.S.-South Korea alliance management was the establishment and use of the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) for developing common policies toward North Korea. The three countries can learn from the TCOG and use other diplomatic and military planning tools to improve the way that they prepare for and respond to complex contingencies, such as a large-scale natural disaster, a regional or global epidemic, or the adverse affects of a failing nation-state.

This book is the product of archival research and dozens of interviews with current and former government officials and military officers from all three countries, focused on evaluating these tools and identifying ways that they can be better integrated to strengthen the alliance relationships and to enhance regional capacity in the areas of crisis and consequence management. The book includes the first comprehensive study of the TCOG from the perspective of the three nations’ participants, as well as a detailed analysis of how they contributed to the unprecedented multilateral response to the 2004 South Asian tsunami disaster.