The international order that emerged after World War II is undergoing a shake-up, although nobody knows for sure what might take its place.
Before Donald Trump became US president, there were indications that he was going to be quite different beyond the norms of established political and diplomatic discourse, but there was also a hope that once in office, he would become more amenable to institutional constraints and traditions at home and abroad.
However, as we are increasingly seeing by the way he conducts state affairs by tweets, Trump is his own specimen with a strong self-belief that he knows best and that his nation and the world needs rescuing from what preceded him. His slogan to “Make America great again” blames his predecessors for its bad times.
The other part of his slogan, “America first” suggests that the world has been taking advantage of the US in all sorts of ways and that, under him, this must stop.
The problem, though, is that Trump has no blueprint or road map about how to go about restructuring his nation internally, as well as its relations with the outside world.
His summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un raised more questions than it provided answers. Regionally, the nation most likely to be concerned about Trump’s enthusiastic wrap-up of the summit outcome would be Japan.
After its defeat in World War II, Japan’s new constitution, imposed by the US made it largely dependent on the US for its external security. Under Article 9 of its pacifist constitution, Japan is prohibited from being a “normal” state with all the necessary military capabilities to conduct external operations.
Despite efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government to get around this, the predominant sentiment among Japanese is against revising their pacifist constitution, scarred as they are by the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the US bombed these two cities to hasten Tokyo’s surrender. Japan is the only nation to have been a testing ground for atomic destruction.
Therefore it is not surprising that the Japanese, by and large, are against, once again, becoming a “normal” state with military power to act beyond its national borders.
Given this constitutional constraint, it has come to depend on the US for its national security in all facets, including, apparently, the US nuclear umbrella. For its defense and as part of the regional security structure, the US has considerable military presence in Japan.
Against this background, Japan is very concerned about the new developments in US-North Korea relations. Apart from the North’s threats to target the US with its long-range missile capability, Pyongyang considers Japan as its main enemy for historical reasons, as Korea was Japan’s colony, and because of its US alliance.
Knowing Trump’s antipathy to Japan in the past when its economic success in the 1980s made it a favorite target of a number of US politicians, Abe sought to cultivate him early on after his election victory.
He followed it up with political and social exchanges. Abe reportedly told Trump, emphasizing their shared antipathy to the media: “You [Trump] and I have many things in common. The New York Times is your enemy and the Asahi Shimbun is my enemy. I have tamed the Asahi; I hope you will tame the Times.”
Abe apparently felt that he needed all that he could muster to become Trump’s chum. He would be acutely aware of Trump’s 1990 interview with Playboy magazine in which he berated Japan for its “devious economic pre-eminence.”
“Japan gets almost 70 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf, relies on ships led back home by our destroyers, battleships, helicopters, frogmen. Then the Japanese sail home, where they give the oil to fuel their factories, so that they can knock the hell out of General Motors, Chrysler and Ford,” Trump said.
“Their openly screwing us is a disgrace. Why aren’t they paying us? The Japanese cajole us, they bow to us, they tell us how great we are and then they pick our pockets. We’re losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year while they laugh at our stupidity,” he added.
In 1987, Trump ran advertisements in major US newspapers berating Japan and other countries for “taking advantage of the United States.”
Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Abe needed to work on Trump, but so far it has not worked.
On the other hand, when Japanese read and hear Trump’s praise of Kim — whose missile tests flew close to Japan — it would make them pretty nervous at the turn the US might be taking under Trump.
For instance, when Trump told Fox News about Kim’s tough character: “When you [Kim] take over a country — a tough country, with tough people — and you take it over from your father, if you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that can do that. So he’s a very smart guy.”
Sushil Seth is a commentator based in Australia.
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