After the trip, Trump told Abe over the phone that he should not feel guilty that he had totally failed, Bolton recalled, while noting that Trump had not expected the Japanese leader to succeed in the mission and he was not surprised at all at the result.

“He turned to what was really on his mind, saying he really appreciated the effort, but that it was really much more important to him personally that Japan buy more US farm products,” Bolton said.

Trump, who has been eager to reduce the US trade deficit with Japan, pressed Abe that the sooner he could do it the better, “like immediately”. The two leaders in September reached a bilateral trade agreement designed to cut tariffs on farm and industrial products.

Trump ‘pleaded’ with Xi Jinping to help him win 2020 election, John Bolton says

Bolton initially did not know Trump had asked Abe to get involved between the US and Iran, a request which the Japanese premier took “seriously”.

“It was clear to me that Trump was pushing Abe into a public role that could only end in failure,” Bolton said in his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.

The 71-year-old Bolton, known as a hardliner on Iran and North Korea, served as Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, when he was ousted by the president over disagreements on policy issues.

In the book, Bolton also said Trump’s “best personal relationship among world leaders was with Abe” both as “golf buddies as well as colleagues”. But he noted that when Boris Johnson became the British prime minister last year, “it became a tie”.

Trump loved mentioning Abe’s father Shintaro Abe, who volunteered to serve as a World War II kamikaze suicide mission pilot before becoming one of the country’s top politicians. Trump used the episode to show how tough the Japanese people were in general, and how tough Abe was in particular, according to Bolton.

The Japanese leader’s name appears more than 100 times in the 578-page memoir, with Bolton saying that they knew each other for over 15 years.

Bolton book could boost Meng Wanzhou’s fight against extradition

Meanwhile, Japan’s defence minister on Tuesday said the US has not asked Tokyo to pay more to keep its troops in the country, after a report cited Bolton as saying he conveyed Trump’s demand for an annual payment of US$8 billion.

“Negotiations over the cost of hosting [American troops] have not started yet,” Defence Minister Taro Kono told a regular news conference. “The Japanese government has not received any request from the United States with regard to this issue.”

Seoul rubbishes ‘distorted’ John Bolton’s memoir on Trump-Kim summit

The current agreement that covers the 54,000 US troops stationed in Japan expires in March 2021.

Asked whether he thought the current cost of hosting the US military was appropriate, Kono said: “The Japan-US alliance is a public asset that contributes to this region’s peace and stability. An arrangement that is lucrative for one side won’t last long.”

Kono said he could not comment specifically on what Bolton had written as he had not read the book.

Bolton’s reported claim is in line with a Foreign Policy report last year that Trump sought a quadrupling of annual payments to around US$8 billion as part of his efforts to push its allies to hike their defence spending.