Stimson Center Program Spotlights US-Japan Alliance

By Elaine Pasquini

 

Washington: Some two weeks after President Donald J Trump was inaugurated for his second term in office, he welcomed Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan to the White House for their first face-to-face meeting on February 7, 2025.

This discussion was a “surprise success in a positive way,” said Yuki Tatsumi, director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center, in a February 21 webinar, featuring Kunihiko Miyake, research director of the Tokyo-based Canon Institute for Global Studies and a former Japanese diplomat, and Ambassador Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr, chairman emeritus of the Stimson Center’s board of directors and former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.

While Japan has done its best not to appear on “Trump’s threat radar screen, unfortunately, we won’t continue to be stealth forever,” Miyake lamented. “Sooner or later, we will become visible…and the tariffs are coming.”

These days, the Japanese diplomat said, he has been pointing out that “Japan is not growing anymore; it’s shrinking.” And although the population is shrinking, “we have to survive, and, in order to survive as an important player in international society, then we have to maintain…that we are a true believer in universal values.”

In addition, he said, Japan is opposed to any change of status quo by force, “but at the same time we have to have strength to deter whatever attempt there is to change the status quo.” Japan “will survive,” he said. But to do that “we have a lot of things to do including the establishment of a real, robust external intelligence service organization.”

Continuing the discussion, the veteran Japanese diplomat looked back at history, noting: “We are getting back to the inter world war sort of period like in the 1930s, and internationalism is sidelined.”

“The United States is acting like it did between World War I and World War II,” he continued. “They talk about the League of Nations, but they didn’t join. They established the United Nations but it’s not working, and Trump is departing, literally, from what we have been working on for the past 80 years. So, thank God, it’s not our government, it’s America’s government. We need to be very smart, very skillful in synchronizing the interests of Japan, the interests of the United States and the personal interests of the president of the United States. That’s never happened before.”

General elections for Japan’s House of Councillors (upper house) scheduled for July 27 could be pivotal for Prime Minister Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which needs to consolidate its power, Miyake said.

“Anything goes in my country now,” he explained. “Things are becoming more and more chaotic. I think the entire conservative movement will be tested this summer.” The LDP, founded in 1955, has been in power almost continuously since that time.

Pointing out that President Trump always likes strong leaders, such as former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Miyake pondered whether Ishiba is strong enough, noting that “the test will come this summer with the two elections – one in the Tokyo municipality assembly and the other one in the upper house.”

Bloomfield noted that President Trump, for whatever reason, wants to have a special friendship with Japan. “He wants Japan to be a good news story for him,” he said. “He doesn’t want to be criticized by the entire franchise of Japan hands and Asia hands. This was sort of destined to be a good news story and the Japanese people, of course, are so welcoming and hospitable and kind.”

Stating his perspective on the Oval Office meeting between the president and his Japanese counterpart, Bloomfield opined that Ishiba and his team returned to Japan “probably feeling pretty good about how well they managed it coming into the first month of this administration.” Now, however, looking at Japan’s security policy “it’s not at all clear that the Trump administration this time will want to preserve the norms of international conduct,” he added.

Now, Bloomfield urges the Japanese to “look at the narrative that Trump is advancing…and don’t get caught up in the specifics of what the truth might be.” President Trump’s “superpower,” he emphasized, is communication.

“I think Japan did a very good job of not departing from the Trump narrative on economics and international security,” he said, but Bloomfield is wondering how long that will continue.

On a more optimistic note, Bloomfield said that President Trump is trying to establish himself as “the changemaker, the dynamic person who saw through the international order and the social and political order – and disrupted it all because he knew what was wrong with it.”

The ambassador believes that if Japan “plays into the narrative,” the country can take the relationship “to a higher level,” not by becoming a partisan advocate in American politics but by projecting that they understand what he’s doing.

There may come a time, Bloomfield predicted, when Japan’s normality, financial responsibility, quest for normal trade relations and understanding of the architecture of stability in northeast Asia and the Pacific generally, become a “plus to the Trump administration,” and that the American president will recognize that this could become an asset to them.

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)