Hiroshima visit is the right call, and so is not apologizing
In the 71 years since the nucle- ar bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, no sitting president has visited the now thriving city. But the site of the first atomic attack in history has not lacked for American presidents.
Richard Nixon visited in 1964, in between his two presidential runs. And Jimmy Carter visited in 1984, after his presidency. Yet the absence of an actual White House occupant is just now coming to an end with the visit Friday by President Obama.
Obama will not apologize for the civilian casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Nor should he. The bombings, as horrific as they were, saved the lives of millions of civilians and soldiers who surely would have died had the United States gone ahead with an invasion of Japan. Many of those lives were Japanese.
The two attacks did not initiate a new era of nuclear warfare. And they took place in the context of a war, initiated by Japan, that had already grown into a grim effort to destroy Japan’s will to fight on. Casualties from conventional bombing raids over the spring and summer of 1945 far exceeded those from the two atomic bombs.
While there is no need to apologize, there isn’t much justification for sitting presidents to avoid the topic.
In Hiroshima, Obama will have a unique platform from which to speak of America’s goals and to remind the world of the role it played in defeating tyranny and rebuilding in its wake.
He will reportedly promote the idea of a world free of nuclear weapons. This is unlikely to produce any practical policies, as President Reagan found in the 1980s when he tried a similar approach. But Obama is right to be broadly aspirational.
He can and should present an America that, while not apologetic, is empathetic. Far older feuds that continue to inspire hatred and violence around the world would benefit from the example of reconciliation and friendship between Japan and the United States.
There is something appealing about the world’s only true superpower — one with a global Navy, sophisticated nuclear arsenal and deep involvements from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula — showing a bit of humanity.
China’s foreign policy is focused on its mercantile interests, acquiring natural resources and grabbing strategic outposts.
Russia’s foreign adventurism is deployed to distract its citizenry from the fact that their economy is underperforming and that their freedoms are being eroded.
Europe is too focused on its internal problems to have much impact beyond its shores.
Much of Asia is eager for closer ties with the USA thanks to Chinese bullying and North Korea’s belligerence. The Philippines has invited the U.S. Navy back to Subic Bay, two decades after expelling it. Vietnam asked for, and received, permission to buy U.S. arms. Other countries are forming alliances among themselves and with the United States.
Obama is right to forge closer ties in the region. But in his Hiroshima speech, he can show that this is more than a marriage of convenience by emphasizing America’s tradition of making friends from its enemies.