Daily Times

The international world order that emerged after WW-II is undergoing a shakeup, though nobody knows for sure what might take its place. Before Trump became the 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, both at home and abroad.

However, as we are increasingly seeing by the way he conducts state affairs through Twitter, it is evident that Trump is his own specimen with a strong self-belief that he knows best and that his country 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 about ‘America first’ suggests that the world has been taking advantage of the United States in all sorts of ways and that, under him, this must stop. The problem, though, is that Trump has no blueprint or roadmap about how to go about restructuring his country internally, as well as, its relations with the outside world.

His recent summit with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, raised more questions than it provided answers. Regionally, the country most likely to be concerned about Trump’s enthusiastic wrap-up of the summit outcome would be Japan.

After its defeat in WW-II, Japan’s new constitution, imposed by the US, made it largely dependent on the US for its external security. Under its pacifist constitution (Article 9), Japan is prohibited from being a ‘normal’ state with all the necessary military capabilities to conduct external operations.

Despite efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government to get around this, the predominant sentiment among the Japanese people 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 Japan’s surrender. Japan is the only country to have become the testing ground of atomic destruction.

It is, therefore, not surprising that the Japanese people, by and large, are against, once again, becoming a ‘normal’ state with military power to act beyond its national borders. And for this constitutional constraint, it has come to depend on the United States for its national security in all its facets, including, apparently, the US nuclear umbrella. And for its defense and as part of the regional security structure, the US has considerable military presence in Japan.

Knowing Trump’s antipathy to Japan in the past when its economic success in the eighties made it a favourite target of a number of American politicians, Prime Minister Abe sought to cultivate him early on after his election victory. And he followed it up with political and social exchanges

Against this background, Japan is very concerned about the new developments in US-North Korea relations. Apart from North Korea’s recent threats to target 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 eighties made it a favourite target of a number of American politicians, Prime Minister Abe sought to cultivate him early on after his election victory. And he followed it up with political and social exchanges.

Indeed, Abe reportedly told Trump, emphasising 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 Shim bun [a leading Japanese newspaper] 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 the Playboy magazine in which he berated Japan for its devious “economic pre-eminence”. He said: “Japan gets almost seventy 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.”

And he went on: “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.”

Earlier in 1987, Trump had taken 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 hasn’t worked.

On the other hand, when the Japanese read and hear Trump’s praise of Kim — whose missile tests were flying close to Japan — It would make them pretty nervous at the turn US might be taking under Trump. For instance, when Trump told Fox News in the US about Kim’s tough character: “When you [referring to Kim Jong-un] take over a country — a tough country, with tough people — and you take it over from your father, if you can do that at twenty-seven years old, I mean, that’s one in ten thousand that can do that. So he’s a very smart guy.”

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia

Published in Daily Times, July 2^nd 2018.