S. Korea discussed as potential Quad working group partner: US official

South Korea has been discussed as a potential future partner for cooperation with issue-specific working groups of the Quad forum, a US official said Tuesday, noting such discussions still "continue" within the group that consists of the United States, Australia, Japan and India.

Camille Dawson, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, made the remarks, underscoring that Quad member countries have so far put their "first priority" on solidifying an internal foundation for cooperation among them.

South Korea has expressed its willingness for cooperation with Quad working groups on climate change, emerging technologies and other areas.

"There has also been a considerable amount of discussion about how we can best bring in other partners who may have specific expertise or capabilities in certain areas," she said during a press briefing on the Quad foreign ministerial meeting slated to take place in Tokyo on Monday.

"The ROK is absolutely one of those countries that has been discussed as a potential future partner in collaboration of some of the specific lines of efforts of the Quad working groups," she added, referring to South Korea by its official name, the Republic of Korea.

She went on to say that "we are not quite there yet" -- in an indication that no clear progress has been made on South Korea's participation for cooperation with Quad working groups.

"Those conversations continue, and we are starting with identifying ways in which we can work with partners around the region in specific areas such as maritime domain awareness where we have already rolled out pilot programs to provide the capacity for countries to be able to see what is in their waters so that they can best respond," she said.

"That's an example of the way in which we foresee working together with our partners in the region, but there are certainly many other potential opportunities out there and we will continue to look at those."

Dawson highlighted that over the past years, Quad members have focused on solidifying the "habits of cooperation" among the four countries, as she answered a question about the possibility of the Quad group expanding its membership.

"It has been the strong belief of the Quad partners that our first priority is really solidifying the cooperative work and the habits of cooperation ... and we have been very focused on that over the past few years," she said.

"The idea is that we want to make sure there is a very solid foundation for the four Quad partners working together across a range of all of the issues covered in the working groups."

Also attending the briefing was Nancy Jackson, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs.

Responding to a question about the security dimension of the Quad forum, Jackson highlighted that the grouping is "not a security apparatus."

"The Quad is a diplomatic network of democracies working to provide public goods. It is not an Asian NATO as we've been accused of being in the past. It is not about security in that hard sense," she said.

She took Quad discussions on maritime security as an example of the group's tasks.

"When we talk about maritime security, for example, what we're talking about is giving countries the ability to better police their waters, so providing commercial satellite data to countries so they can crack down on things like illegal fishing," she said.

"It's security in the sense of policing their waters and upholding their rights as countries to be able to know what's happening in their shores, but it is not a security network." (Yonhap)