Last week, the government of South Korea announced that it would not renew its participation in the 2016 General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Japan.

GSOMIA’s demise has been met with great dismay in Washington, D.C., where it is seen as the loss of an important fundamental building block in trilateral coordination in Northeast Asia as the diplomatic crisis between Seoul and Tokyo continues to worsen. The crisis has been brewing since the November 2018 South Korean Supreme Court decision on wartime forced labor by Japan’s Mitsubishi — and really since the December 2015 agreement on