US President Barack Obama yesterday lauded Washington’s 50-year-old alliance with Japan as vital to the stability of the Asia-Pacific region as he signaled that the strains of the last year now lay in the past.
US relations with Tokyo frayed after the Democratic Party of Japan swept to power last year vowing to forge more equal ties with the US and review an agreement on relocating a US Marine airbase on Japan’s Okinawa island.
However, wariness over a rising China and an unpredictable North Korea has bolstered incentives to strengthen the alliance.
“With regard to our shared security, we affirmed our commitment to our alliance, which marks its 50 anniversary this year,” Obama said, standing beside Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan as they spoke to reporters after meeting on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in Yokohama, south of Tokyo. “The commitment of the United States to the defense of Japan is unshakable.”
“Our alliances, bases and forward presence are essential not only to Japan’s security, but ... they help us ensure stability and address regional challenges across North Asia,” he said.
In an oblique reference to China, Obama praised Japan as setting a good example globally for other nations.
“Japan is really a model citizen internationally and works in support of international rules and norms that can make all of us more prosperous and more secure,” the president said.
Strains have dogged Beijing’s relations with both Washington and Tokyo recently, and both are wary of China’s hefty military spending and willingness to send its navy further afield.
The US wants China to let its yuan currency appreciate to help cut its huge trade surplus. Beijing says Washington is using an easy money policy to boost exports.
Sino-Japanese ties have soured because of a dispute over islands in the East China Sea, while Tokyo’s relations with Russia chilled after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited an isle north of Japan claimed by both countries.
“In Japan’s relations with China and Russia, recently we’ve faced some problems, and the United States has supported -Japan throughout, so I expressed my appreciation to him for that,” Kan said. “For the peace and security of the countries in the region, the presence of the United States and the presence of the US military I believe is only becoming increasingly important.”
Obama’s trip to Tokyo last year had been markedly cooler because of a dispute over where to relocate the Marines’ Futenma airbase and concerns that Kan’s predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, might tilt Tokyo’s foreign policy more toward China.
Kan said he’d make maximum efforts to implement a deal on the base agreed between the two countries, once local elections there were decided, although the outlook for success is dim.
Obama repeated Washington’s support for Japan’s bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and said Kan had accepted an invitation to visit the United States next year.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees