The specter of unavoidable conflict haunted the first “trilateral summit” Monday of leaders of the People’s Republic of China, Japan, and South Korea since the Covid pandemic was detected in China in December 2019. 

Try as they might, there was no getting around the communist aggression in the air and seas around the island democracy on Taiwan and the threat of North Korean atomic weapons and missiles. Plus, too, the North announced plans to launch a spy satellite by next week.

President Yoon of South Korea, hosting the summit at  Seoul, China’s premier, Li Qiang, and Prime Minister Kishida of Japan, preferred to see the bright side. The press secretary for Japan’s foreign ministry, Maki Kobayashi, studiously avoided any mention of Taiwan as she fended off questions about what she said was “trilateral cooperation” by not alluding openly to the issues that normally make top headlines. 

“We are focusing on areas where we have to cooperate,” she said after the parley wrapped up with a 2,700 word statement at which the leaders “reaffirmed our commitment to trilateral cooperation for the next decade.” Ms. Kobayashi conceded that “there might be difficult moments trilaterally” but said the leaders, in separate bilateral talks Sunday, did speak “quite extensively on various issues and discussed issues of common concern.”

That was one way of saying Taiwan might have come up in one-on-one talks, but she didn’t breathe the name of the island democracy whose feisty president, William Lai, has to deal with mounting communist threats since his inauguration one week ago.

The statement covered a long wish list of future cooperation on areas ranging from “a level playing field” on trade to student exchanges to disaster relief to illegal fishing. It was all there — all, that is, other than military aggression or alliances or the threat the People’s Republic of China seems to feel from the democracy 90 miles away across the Taiwan Strait.

Nor did North Korea come up, except in an immaculately worded penultimate paragraph in which the three “reaffirmed that maintaining peace, stability and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia serves our common interest and is our common responsibility.”

Finally, delicately, they said they had “reiterated positions on regional peace and stability, denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the abductions issue, respectively” — that last a perennial sore spot while North Korea holds hundreds of South Koreans and at least 17 Japanese kidnapped years ago.

They would, they said, keep talking among themselves and at multinational forums like the United Nations Security Council, where Communist China has joined Russia in vetoing sanctions and flouting those that exist.

Messrs. Yoon and Kishida, both of whom have strengthened their separate alliances with Washington, obviously differed with Mr. Li when it came to what they thought of North Korea’s announcement of plans to launch a spy satellite.

South Korea and Japan both denounced it as a “provocative” act in violation of sanctions while the South deployed 20 F-35 fighter planes near the North-South line. 

Mr. Yoon, standing between Mr. Li and Mr. Kishida, at a joint press conference, called on “the international community” to “respond firmly.” Dexterously, Mr. Li got around the issue, calling on “relevant parties” to “exercise restraint and prevent the situation from worsening and becoming more complicated.” 

Korea, Japan, and China, he said,  should “practice genuine multilateralism to jointly safeguard stability in the Northeast Asian region” — a way of criticizing alliances with the Americans. Of course, he avoided naming North Korea, which China has supported with oil and food ever since allying with the North in the Korean War more than 70 years ago.