Mike Pompeo, who as CIA director has taken the lead in preparing for the Trump-Kim talks later this spring, gave Japanese officials more reason to worry. During his Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of state last week, he said that the goal of the summit “is to address the nuclear threat to the United States.” The U.S. and North Korean leaders will seek to identify conditions for an agreement in which North Korea “will step away from its efforts to hold America at risk with nuclear weapons, completely and verifiably,” he explained. But North Korea also holds America’s regional allies at risk—notably South Korea and Japan. Pompeo’s suggestion was that U.S. negotiators might focus in the near term on eliminating North Korea’s newly developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which may be capable of delivering nuclear warheads to the U.S. mainland, rather than the shorter-range missiles that expose South Korea and Japan to nuclear attack.

At Mar-a-Lago, Abe will urge Trump to include North Korea’s short- and intermediate-range missiles, along with the North’s abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s, among the priorities in his deliberations with Kim Jong Un. Removing Kim’s long-range missiles “has no meaning for Japan,” Abe told lawmakers ahead of his trip to the United States. But more broadly he will remind the president of just how much is at stake in the nuclear negotiations for Japan, which has lived under the North Korean nuclear threat for years and, given its defense treaty with the U.S. and pacifist postwar constitution, relies heavily on America’s nuclear and conventional arsenals for its security.

To be fair, Japan and the United States do appear to agree that North Korea shouldn’t be granted sanctions relief or economic assistance in return for simply engaging in dialogue or taking incremental steps toward denuclearization, as has happened during previous bouts of ultimately unsuccessful diplomacy. And Trump administration officials insist that Tokyo and Washington are closely coordinating their North Korea policies. “The president of the United States is always keeping careful consideration of the interests of our allies … as well as the interests of securing the American people,” a senior administration official told reporters last week, noting that Trump has met more times with Abe than with any other foreign leader and speaks with him frequently by phone.

Yet all those meetings, all those phone calls, all those hats and rounds of golf did not result in Shinzo Abe receiving advance notice of or a ticket to the Trump-Kim summit. Nor have they resulted yet in Trump rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal Japan has spearheaded since the United States withdrew from the pact last year, or granting Japan an exemption to steel and aluminum tariffs even though every other major U.S. ally has been exempted from the measures. Abe is a “great guy, friend of mine,” Trump noted in discussing the tariffs in March, and he’s probably smiling as if to say “‘I can’t believe we’ve been able to take advantage of the United States for so long.’” Those days, the president proclaimed, “are over.”