Japan’s Abe remains Trump’s best ally
JAPAN - A decisive election win for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe boosts one of US President Donald Trump’s strongest allies in Asia as both Washington and Tokyo grapple with how to handle Pyongyang.
Abe, a conservative hawk, has long been a supporter of Trump’s more aggressive North Korea policy, which has coincided with his attempts to rewrite Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution. Following Sunday’s vote, Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera warned the threat from North Korea which has repeatedly fired missiles over Japan in recent months had reached an “unprecedented, critical and imminent” level. The US, South Korea and Japan need to collectively trial “different responses” for tackling the regime, Onodera told a meeting of the countries’ military officials Monday. Trump and Abe have shared a strong relationship since before the US President was inaugurated, with Abe traveling to Trump Tower in New York to meet with Trump while Barack Obama was still in office. During that “unoffi- cial” meeting, Trump’s first with any world leader, Abe hailed the US-Japan alliance and said he wanted to “build trust” with the new President. Their initially strong relationship was strengthened during Abe’s second visit to the US, when at Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago, North Korea fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the first since Trump’s inauguration. As the North Korea issue has escalated and come to dominate Trump’s first year in office, Abe has largely supported the White House’s increasingly aggressive, hawkish line on Pyongyang.
According to some insiders, this is helped by a strong personal relationship between the two leaders, in contrast to more fractious ties between Trump and South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, who has attempted to walk a more delicate line and pursue greater diplomacy with North Korea. “Trump sees Moon as more acquiescent (towards Pyongyang) on some of the key questions as regards the North,” said Alex Neill, a senior fellow at the ShangriLa Dialogue. Euan Graham, director of the International Security Program at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute, said Washington views Abe as “probably as good as it gets in terms of security cooperation from a Japanese leader.” (CNN.COM)