Japan’s Pivot from Obama to Trump
Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in May. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHANNES EISELE / AFP / GETTY
On Monday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama later this month, which will make him the first sitting Japanese leader to travel to the Navy base since Shigeru Yoshida went, in 1951, ten years after it was attacked by Japan’s Imperial Army. Abe called the visit “an opportunity for reconciliation between the U.S. and Japan” and a chance to “reconfirm” the security alliance between the two countries.
It also gives Abe the opportunity to return a significant gesture made by Obama, last May, when he became the first sitting U.S. President to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seventy-one years after the United States levelled the Japanese city with an atomic bomb. But the success Abe and Obama have had confronting the past has not always translated into accomplishing shared goals for the future, which have included the implementation of a new free-trade agreement and an expanded role for Japan’s military.
“In terms of symbolic gestures that are meaningful in further putting to rest ghosts of the past, and taking into account the upcoming visit to Pearl Harbor, President Obama and Prime Minister Abe have covered and will cover important ground, even taboo-breaking ground,” Ken Ruoff, the director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University, told me. He added, however, that “my sense is that the Abe administration, and the leaders of other Asian countries which fear the rise of China, found the Obama Administration’s rhetoric about an ‘Asia pivot’ to be more symbolic and less substantive than they would have liked.”
That “Asia pivot” began in 2009, when Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, took office and made a flurry of gestures meant to set a reassuring tone for his Administration’s goals in the region. In speeches, he called China a partner, and he made efforts to avoid moves that might upset relations with the country until after he had a chance to meet with Hu Jintao, China’s leader at the time.
But his earliest and strongest reassurances were directed toward Japan. Less than a month after taking office, Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Tokyo for her first foreign mission. Then, a week later, he welcomed Japan’s Prime Minister at the time, Taro Aso, as the first foreign leader to visit him at the White House. After Abe took office for a second time, in 2012, Obama had a stable counterpart who was committed not only to free trade but also to a goal that would make Japan a stronger military ally in the region. The two leaders reached an agreement that would expand Japan’s ability to come to the defense of the United States. But that agreement means little without a revision of Japan’s constitution to change or eliminate Article 9, which outlaws war as a means of settling international disputes, and thereby limits the support it can offer as a deterrent against an ascendant China.
Constitutional revision has long been a goal for the hawkish Abe, who has said that Japan should have the kind of military necessary to protect its people and support its allies. But while a bold fiscal policy, known as “Abenomics,” has helped the economy enough to keep Abe’s approval ratings high, public support for revising Japan’s pacifist constitution remains low, making it impossible for the Prime Minister to build the kind of parliamentary coalition he needs for such a move.
The recent Presidential election in the United States has changed the calculation for Abe in unexpected ways. Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton certainly doomed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact on which Abe—and Obama—staked significant political capital. But it may end up helping Abe achieve his goals for Japan’s constitution and its military.
As a candidate, Trump seemed decidedly unfriendly toward Japan. At his rallies, he rekindled the Japan-bashing rhetoric of the nineteen-eighties, invoking the spectre of long-resolved trade disputes, and he seemed, at times, to conflate Japan with China. Then he strayed even further from traditional East Asian policy by threatening to quash a fifty-six-year-old U.S. security alliance with Japan, which remains a crucial check on Chinese hegemony and North Korean aggression.
“You know we have a treaty with Japan, where if Japan is attacked we have to use the full force and might of the United States,” Trump said during the campaign. “If we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to do anything. They can sit home and watch Sony television, O.K.?”
But then, on November 17th, Abe became the first world leader to meet with President-elect Trump, and the two men reportedly plan to meet again in late January, after Trump takes office. (According to the Japan Times, five weeks before the election, Michael T. Flynn, whom Trump has since chosen as his national-security adviser, secretly met with Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, during a trip to Tokyo, and told him that the military alliance between the U.S. and Japan would remain intact under a Trump Presidency.)
Abe’s visit to Trump Tower in November went against the wishes of Obama’s White House, according to a Japanese media report, which cited an unnamed diplomatic source who said that it would be “unprecedented” because, “Mr. Trump is not yet the president.” But Richard Samuels, who heads the Center for International Studies at M.I.T., told me that Abe’s team “did what they had to do, quickly and well.”
“I think Abe correctly sees a great opportunity if he can convince President-elect Trump that he’s the good guy in Asia, and that Japan wears the white hat out there,” he said.
Ironically, Trump’s tough talk may help Abe achieve what Obama’s pivot never could: broad support from the Japanese public for revising Japan’s constitution.
“Japan becoming more militarily muscular is certainly a goal of Abe’s, and there is a possibility Trump will give Japan’s Prime Minister more freedom to do the things he wants, which is to contribute more to the alliance militarily, on the security side,” Samuels told me, adding that Trump’s provocations toward China might also affect the political calculus, but only if the situation goes “beyond mere tensions.”
“A crisis of some kind might help shift public opinion,” he told me. “But it would probably take an incident of the kind that really scares people.”
The potential for an incident of the kind Samuels describes grows more likely as China steps up its incursions into disputed islands claimed by Japan and other nations in the region.
Last May, when Obama spoke at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, it seemed like every television in Japan was tuned to the broadcast. I watched from a noodle restaurant in central Tokyo, where I saw grown men moved to tears by the President’s hope that Hiroshima and Nagasaki be known “not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.” It’s difficult to imagine such sombre reflections on the past during a Trump Presidency. But the past may require less of Abe’s attention than the future if he continues his successful pivot from Obama to Trump.
