Analysis | Shinzo Abe heads to US to put Japan back in North Korea game ahead of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un
Japan’s prime minister will seek to coordinate policies with Donald Trump before the US president holds historic talks with North Korea’s leader
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heads to the US Tuesday, hoping his carefully cultivated relations with “golf buddy” Donald Trump will help keep Japan in the loop and out of danger amid a flurry of diplomacy on North Korea.
During talks at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, the two allies are expected to stress the need to maintain “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang, as well as thrash out bilateral trade frictions.
Few leaders have courted the US president as furiously as Abe, who famously visited Trump in his gilded New York tower before the billionaire businessman was even sworn in.
The two golf-mad leaders traded fist-bumps on the course and tucked into burgers and ketchup at a golf club outside Tokyo during Trump’s visit in November, where the pair got on so well it sparked headlines of a “bromance”.
However, the recent breakneck pace of diplomacy around the Korean peninsula nuclear crisis has left Japan battling for relevance, even though it is arguably under the greatest threat.
Buttering up Trump “did Abe’s image some good domestically for a while … but such efforts have not produced enough results if you look at things objectively,” said professor Mieko Nakabayashi, an expert in US-Japan relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University and former lawmaker.