The Japanese PM will get a game with Donald Trump in Florida this weekend, but his handicap will be anybody’s guess

Donald Trump may have found the perfect golf partner in the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. If rumours about the US president’s fairway gamesmanship are to be believed, Abe is likely to turn a blind eye to any skullduggery on the links in Florida this weekend.



Although Tokyo won assurances of Washington’s commitment to Japan’s security from the defence secretary, James Mattis, last weekend, the thorny issue of trade is likely to cast a pall over the leaders’ summit, which begins in Washington later on Friday and ends with a round of golf at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on Saturday.

“We’re going to have a round of golf, which is a great thing,” Trump said in an interview this week with Westwood One Sports Radio. “That’s the one thing about golf – you get to know somebody better on a golf course than you will over lunch.”

He has promised that he and Abe will have “a lot of fun”, but what has been billed as a friendly game “between partners” could take on a more competitive edge if the leaders’ personal rapport fails to bring them together on trade.

Trump has blasted Japanese auto trade practices as unfair, and claimed, incorrectly, that Japan imposes tariffs that make it “impossible to sell American cars in Japan”. He also criticised plans by Toyota to build a new plant in Mexico, and suggested he would impose a “border tax” on companies that based themselves outside the US.



Officials in Washington have not dismissed the possibility that Trump will take Abe to task over the trade imbalance and what he has described as deliberate attempts by Tokyo to devalue the yen to gain an unfair trade advantage over the US.

Abe will not go to Washington empty-handed. Accompanied by his foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, and finance minister, Taro Aso, he is expected to directly appeal to Trump by unveiling an ambitious policy package that could create 700,000 US jobs through private-public investment in high-speed trains and other infrastructure.

Trump is reportedly willing to reciprocate by proposing a bilateral free trade deal that would replace the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement that Trump ripped up as soon as he moved into the White House.



Demonstrating a commitment to American jobs is “part of Japan’s efforts to explain to Trump that it is a friendly nation” in both security and trade, according to Mikitaka Masuyama, a politics professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

But having smoothed his path to the White House with repeated promises to put “America first”, Trump’s protectionist instincts will not have been calmed by new data showing that the US trade deficit with Japan grew to $68.94bn (£55bn) last year.

With so much at stake, Abe is one of the few world leaders to have refrained from criticising Trump’s immigration policy. Instead, he will appeal to Trump’s business instincts with cautiously worded reminders of Japanese automakers’ huge investments in the US economy.

This weekend’s talks are the culmination of an Abe charm offensive that began with a meeting with the then president-elect at Trump Tower in New York in November, during which the two men laid the foundations for their “golf diplomacy”. Trump gave Abe a golf shirt; the prime minister reciprocated with a $3,700 gold-coloured golf club.

Abe returned from New York claiming that Trump was a leader in whom the world could have confidence, yet just weeks later, the president prompted despair in Tokyo when he made good on a campaign promise to pull the US out of the TPP.

With little hope that the deal can be resurrected, Abe will arrive armed with an array of statistics he hopes will refute claims that US-Japan trade is a one-way street.

This weekend’s jaunt to Florida, for which Trump is reportedly footing the bill, will not be the first time Japanese and US leaders have attempted to bond over a game of golf.

As prime minister, Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, played Dwight Eisenhower in Maryland in 1957 in what the media described as a “triumph of diplomacy” between the former wartime enemies, and which paved the way for today’s “unshakeable” military alliance.

Abe, a member of the prestigious Three Hundred Club near Tokyo, where membership fees are as high as 80m yen ($715,000) a year, has kept his handicap a secret, but is rumoured to be no better than an average weekend golfer.



That is just as well.

As he seeks concessions from Trump, the Japanese leader would do well to remember that on his grandfather’s outing on the links six decades ago, it was Eisenhower who emerged victorious.