Trumps World-Leader Buddy [Abe of Japan] Is Starting to Regret It

Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump are pictured. | Getty Images

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Letter from Japan
Trump’s World-Leader Buddy Is Starting to Regret It

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wooed the new American president harder than anyone. But his bet on Trump is not looking so hot today.

By WILLIAM PESEK

April 01, 2018


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TOKYO—Japan’s Shinzo Abe probably embraced Donald Trump faster, and with more warmth, than any other foreign leader after the reality-TV star shocked the world with his upset victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Now, he’s having buyer’s remorse.

On March 25, the Japanese prime minister lunched with Barack Obama in Tokyo, setting off warm reminiscences of their “sushi summits” in the local press. For Abe, the reunion was the political equivalent of comfort food.

The 14 months since Trump stomped into the White House have been a different kind of raw for the Japanese establishment—and increasingly unappetizing for a government that prizes strong U.S. ties above any other relationship.

Dating back to the 1980s, Trump was among America’s most vocal Japan critics. In 1989, the real estate mogul said Japan “systematically sucked the blood out of America” and called for a 20 percent tariff on all its goods. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump called for Japan to pay more for Washington’s security blanket—saying “we can't afford to do it anymore”—and raised the specter of Tokyo developing its own nuclear weapons.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016, Abe’s government was as shocked as any. In fact, when Abe had visited New York 50 days earlier, then-front-runner Clinton was his first port of call. Trump Tower, just a few blocks away, didn’t make the cut. But priorities changed rapidly. Just nine days after the billionaire trumped Clinton, Abe became the first world leader to visit Trump Tower—and made what may end up being the biggest blunder of his premiership.

That day, Abe unequivocally vouched for the “America First” president. “I am convinced Mr. Trump is a leader in whom I can have great confidence” and with whom he could have “a relationship of trust,” Abe told reporters. Japanologists lined up to applaud the two men’s budding bromance, believing it would protect the Japan-U.S. alliance and accord Tokyo preferential Trump treatment. As Columbia University Japan expert Gerald Curtis put it at the time, “Abe has succeeded in getting Trump to drop his campaign rhetoric about Japan and has gotten their relationship off to a good start.”


But as Trump wages an escalating trade war, threatens actual combat in North Asia and fawns over authoritarian leaders, Abe’s bet on the new American president is looking worse by the day. In a March 29 editorial, Nikkei Asian Review captured the zeitgeist here as it warned that Abe’s foreign policy is, as a headline put it, “on the rocks as U.S. sets off alone.” Here are three ways Tokyo’s bet on Trump has gone awry.

1) An escalating trade war. The first hints Abe miscalculated came when Trump, three days into his term, withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Abe joining Obama’s TPP was an epochal moment for Japan Inc., which spent decades reinforcing trade barriers. On the table at those Obama-Abe “sushi summits” was Washington’s belief that Japan’s rigid economy needed a supply-side shock. The U.S. knew, too, that any 12-nation pact meant to check China’s influence was pointless without Asia’s No. 2 economy. Abe signed on with his trusted ally—only to see Trump say “never mind.”

Since then, Trump announced a series of tariffs—including levies of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum—that shoulder-checked the global financial system. Not only was Abe, supposedly Trump’s best pal among world leaders, caught flatfooted, but Tokyo was left off the list of exempted countries......................