Shinzo Abe and the Diverging US-Japan Relationship

While President Bush poured praise on the Chinese for facilitating the deal, Japan was left as the odd man out, refusing to join the energy aid program.

And it's not as if Abe extracted any political capital by packaging this embarrassing outcome as a piece of principled intransigence.

Unwilling to denounce the deal, he meekly asserted that, despite its absence from the North Korean consensus, Japan was "not isolated".

As reported in the New York Times:

Critics said Tokyo's narrow focus on [the abductee] issue, seemingly at the expense of regional stability, would leave it isolated.
...
"We must not be isolated and we are not in fact isolated," Mr. Abe said in Parliament. "Other countries understood our decision not to provide oil unless progress is made in the abduction issue."(Norimitsu Onishi, South Korea and Japan Split on North Korea Pact, New York Times, Feb. 15, 2007)

Despite Prime Minister Abe's protestations, all is not rosy.

Bloomberg reported:

Opposition politicians said Japan was ``out of the loop'' because the agreement failed to address the issue most important to the Japanese public: North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens three decades ago.
...
The agreement signed in Beijing yesterday ``limits Japan's options regarding the abduction issue,'' said C. Kenneth Quinones, former U.S. State Department director of North Korea affairs and a professor at Akita International University in Japan. Abe ``has virtually no leverage with either Pyongyang or other six-party talk participants.''

Now, Abe-whose government was making noises last summer about pre-emptive strikes on North Korean missile facilities in the great American tradition-doesn't look like our sheriff in North Asia. He looks like Barney Fife.

In a February 15th article entitled With U.S. shift, Abe's N. Korea Containment Strategy Falls Apart, Asahi drove another nail in the coffin:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's containment policy for North Korea--a stance that helped him vault to power--is quickly crumbling.

The agreement reached Tuesday at the six-party talks in Beijing, in which North Korea would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid, shows that Washington has softened its stance toward Pyongyang.

That is bad news for Abe.

The prime minister continues to assert that Japan will not provide energy assistance to North Korea until the issue of Pyongyang's abductions of Japanese citizens is resolved.

But Abe's words now carry less weight compared to last year, when Japan and the United States were closely consulting on containing North Korea following its missile launches and nuclear test.

"While I would not say Japan has had the ladder taken out from under it, there is no denying that there has been a change in the tide," a senior official in the Cabinet Secretariat said.

An important multi-part article in Yomiuri has explored the rapidly growing divergence between Japan and the United States, as exemplified by the negotiations with North Korea.

According to the report, it all started with the cataclysm of the U.S. mid-term elections, which forced the Bush administration to turn away from the confrontational policies of the neo-cons to a dovish negotiated track led by the State Department.

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http://counterpunch.org/china02202007.html