A Bumpy Road Ahead for US-Japan Relations

U.S.-Japan relations appear solid. U.S. President Donald J. Trump just visited Japan as the first state guest after the imperial succession in May and he returned to Japan to attend the G-20 summit in Osaka at the end of June. With Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meeting Trump in Florida in April, the two leaders are on an extraordinary once-a-month meeting schedule. In addition, the two leaders also exchange frequent phone calls. There is little doubt that Abe has accomplished what very few of his colleagues around the world have – keeping his personal relationship with Trump friendly.

Abe has strived to achieve just that from the moment Trump defied everyone’s expectations and was elected to be the 45th president of the United States. Abe flew to New York with a gift of a golf club in hand to have a one-on-one meeting with Trump when the latter was still president-elect. During Trump’s visit last month, Abe rolled out a red carpet for Trump. From breaking the tradition of no foreign guests being allowed on the sumo ring to treating the first couple to a banquet hosted by the new Emperor and Empress Reiwa, it seems there is no limit to the effort Abe will make to ensure he stays on Trump’s good side.

But beyond the appearance of a bromance, how has Abe’s strategy of courting Trump helped Japan? Not much, is the unfortunate answer. Despite Abe’s earnest efforts, Japan was slapped with steep tariffs on its steel and aluminum exports to the United States – a decision that Abe failed to reverse. Regardless of how the Japanese government wants to spin it, Tokyo is now in the middle of a tense bilateral trade negotiation with the United States that resembles the talks that went on between the late 1980s through the early 1990s. Trump showed a little consideration for Abe’s domestic political schedule – he and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are facing elections in the House of Councillors (Japan’s upper house) in July – when he indicated that no trade deal is likely to come until after August, but there is no indication of how the negotiation will shake out in the end.

Still, the conventional wisdom has been that regardless of tensions on trade, defense relations between the two countries are solid. But there is a source of concern coming down the road in this area as well. Come 2020 (when Trump’s re-election campaign will go into high gear), Japan will enter negotiations to renew its bilateral agreement with the United States for host-nation support (HNS). The good news is that Japan is already paying a lot: Japan’s HNS covers close to 8 percent of the cost for the U.S. military to be forward-deployed to Japan. The bad news is the United States will be just coming off of a bilateral Special Measures Agreement (SMA) renewal with South Korea. Last year, Washington and Seoul were unable to reach the usual five-year renewal agreement and had to settle for a one-year stopgap measure. The two sides could not bridge their differences: The United States demanded South Korea pay considerably more and South Korea refused to cave. If 2018’s tug-of-war over SMA renewal is any guide, Tokyo can expect the next round of U.S.-South Korea SMA negotiation, whose preliminary talks could begin as early as July, will be just as contentious. While there is no way to predict how the 2019 SMA renewal talks will shake out, the process so far does not give Tokyo a reason to be optimistic that the United States will somehow be “softer” in its position once the similar HNS renewal negotiation begins.

Then there is the persistent issue of the Futenma Replacement Facility in Okinawa. Japan and the United States have been trying to relocate the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma since 1995 following a brutal incident there in which U.S. servicemen kidnapped and raped a local underage schoolgirl. Almost 25 years later, the relocation is still moving at a glacial pace, and is not likely to speed up with a new Okinawan governor, who is staunchly against the construction of the Futenma Replacement Facility, in place. The lack of progress on the MCAS Futenma relocation attracted attention even during the Obama administration – Tokyo definitely does not want Trump to notice the slowness with which the relocation project continues to move. Depending on how the HNS negotiation goes, though, there is a risk that it will get the exact presidential attention that Japan does not want.

It is premature to determine how either of these negotiations – either on trade or the HNS – will ultimately shake out, much less how the long-standing Futenma issue will unfold. But the question that will be asked in the end will always be: “Did Abe’s effort to court Trump help Japan?” Things are not looking good for Abe on that question.