As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended a high-profile two-day meeting with U. S. President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida Thursday, he may hav
As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended a high-profile two-day meeting with U. S. President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida Thursday, he may have felt relieved at — or possibly even proud — having just pulled off a better than expected summit that some Japan-based analysts said could have gone much worse.
The beleaguered Japanese leader was in need of a win, desperately craving an opportunity to demonstrate that Japan-U. S. solidarity remains strong, as he tries to dispel mounting criticism at home that, under his stewardship, his government as been repeatedly caught off-guard by Trump’s recent policy shifts on North Korea and trade issues.
And though the two leaders still remain at loggerheads over some trade issues, they were able to largely coordinate their views on North Korea, experts said.
“The extent to which they were in sync with each other on North Korea was almost creepy,” Kazuhiro Maeshima, a professor of contemporary American politics at Sophia University, told The Japan Times.
Abe and Trump both confirmed that they would not repeat the “mistakes of past administrations,” vowing not to fall for false promises from Pyongyang that it would abandon its nuclear program and to keep the “maximum-pressure” campaign going until the regime denuclearizes in a “complete, verifiable and irreversible” way.
Perhaps more noteworthy was the extraordinary lengths Trump went to address the decades-long abduction issue involving Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 80s.
Trump not only promised to raise the issue with Kim Jong Un when he talks with him in a planned meeting in the coming months, but also voiced his commitment to “do everything possible to have them brought back,” even crediting Abe with successfully having influence on the way he views the matter.
“His level of enthusiasm was unbelievable,” Trump said of an impassioned speech Abe had given on the abductees — one of Abe’s top policy priorities — during a dinner Wednesday.
“Abduction is a very important issue for me because it’s very important to your prime minister,” Trump said, answering a question from a Japanese reporter.
Unlike his predecessors, who regarded the abduction issue as more of a distraction from the primary U.
