Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent Saturday with US President Donald Trump in Florida after meetings at the White House on Friday. The two-day trip, which follows Abe becoming the first foreign leader last November to meet Trump after his election victory, reflects the prime minister’s desire to form a close personal bond with the president and fortify US-Japan ties in the face of growing international uncertainty.
Already, this charm offensive may be paying some dividends with Trump pointing on Friday to the bilateral relationship as the “cornerstone of peace” in Asia-Pacific and the strong US commitment to the “security of Japan”. This consolidates the comments of US Defence Secretary James Mattis who referred in Tokyo earlier this month to the “unwavering alliance” between the two countries.
Abe is very concerned to mitigate potential risks in the bilateral relationship given Trump’s negative comments last year on the campaign trail about Japan. The now-president, previously, criticised the country for unfair trade practices involving car imports and exports; accused it of using monetary policy to devalue its currency to boost exporters; and asserted that the bilateral security relationship had become too one-side with Japan needed to undertake more financial burden-sharing.
For Abe, now more than four years into his second stint as prime Japanese minister, his meetings at the White House and at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida were intended to showcase the enduring strength of US-Japan relations. Here he will be pleased by Trump’s acceptance on Friday of an invitation to a trip to Tokyo this year; the new “bilateral dialogue framework” that has been set up to be co-chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and Vice-President Mike Pence; and Trump’s assessment that “the bond between our two nations and the friendship between our two peoples runs very, very deep. This administration is committed to bringing those ties even closer”.
One key international reason that Abe is particularly keen to be close to Trump is Japanese concerns about a ‘rising China’ in Asia-Pacific. He has particular worries about China’s growing influence in the context of the uncertainties that Trump’s presidency will bring, including unravelling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which opens up a window for Beijing to assert itself into the vacuum of power that now exists around the trade and investment deal’s apparent collapse.
China’s alternative vision to the TPP is for a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) plus a pact, for which discussions have been under way since 2012, known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) which would not include the United States, mirroring the exclusion of Beijing from the previously proposed TPP. At the heart of this debate is been not just competing trade treaties, but contrasting US and Chinese visions to shape the regional order and cement their influence in it.
From China’s perspective, the RCEP and the FTAAP would be much more conducive to its national interests (not least because it would be explicitly part of the new economic agreements and shape their design) by creating free trade areas with China potentially at the centre. And by playing a lead role in championing these initiatives, Beijing aspires to burnish its regional leadership credentials.
And this dynamic is playing out in the context of broader tensions in Asia-Pacific which could be exacerbated by the unpredictability of Trump’s presidency. Already China, whose leader President Xi Jinping spoke on the phone for the first time with his US counterpart last Thursday but has not yet arranged a visit to see him, has been taken aback by the White House’s questioning of Washington’s long-standing ‘One China’ policy, and Trump’s phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen late last year, believed to be the first direct contact between a sitting US president-elect or president and his Taiwanese counterpart since the 1970s. Moreover, there are also continuing tensions in the South China Sea where Japan has been planning to ramp up joint training patrols with Washington and exercises with regional navies. In this theatre, it is not just Japan and the United States, but also other countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei, that are in dispute with China in the sea through which some $5 trillion (Dh18.36 trillion) of ship-borne trade passes each year.
Fluid geopolitical landscape
In this fluid geopolitical landscape, Abe is seeking to align his long-standing foreign policy plans around that of Trump’s nascent agenda. Thus, in a context whereby the president appears to want a more internationally assertive Japan, the prime minister is seeking to overturn much of the remaining legal and political underpinning of the country’s post-war pacifist security identity so that it can become more externally engaged.
One big, specific measure Abe wants to push for is abolition of Article Nine. This is the clause in Japan’s post-war constitution which constrains the country’s military to a strictly defensive role rather than a conventional army, and has meant that defence spending has most often remained below 1 per cent of GDP.
To overturn this, Abe would need not just a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature, but also a simple majority in a national referendum. Straightforward as that may sound, given Abe’s currently high domestic approval rating, it could prove a major challenge given the large body of Japanese public opinion which still values its post-war pacifism in the only country in the world to have ever been attacked with nuclear weapons.
Taken overall, the Washington and Florida meetings represented Abe’s latest move to fortify Japan’s long-standing US alliance in the face of China’s rise. He now senses that four years into his second premiership, he may have a window of opportunity to move forward with landmark domestic constitutional change around the country’s post-war pacifism which will enable it to become more internationally engaged, but at risk of potentially significantly inflaming regional tensions with Beijing.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics.
