Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heads to the U. S. 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
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heads to the U. S. 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 U. S. 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 U. S.-Japan relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University and former lawmaker.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has summits scheduled with South Korea and the United States and has already met Chinese President Xi Jinping, leaving Japan conspicuously on the sidelines, with reported overtures from Tokyo toward Pyongyang going unanswered.
Yet it is over Japan that North Korean missiles have been flying and threats to sink the island nation “into the sea” have kept people on edge.
