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If there’s one thing to say about President Trump’s trip to Asia, it’s that the excursion was relatively subdued. With the exception of one tweet and a not-unexpected display of chumminess with Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, Trump didn’t commit any major gaffes or blunder into any events of elevated consequence. And in many ways, that was the entire point. As commentators have repeatedly reminded us, Trump was visiting Asia to reassure the region he isn’t a total loose cannon. With North Korea engaging in increasingly provocative actions, the narrative goes, it is important that Trump ease international fears about his temperament and work to align rather than divide the regional actors currently embroiled in nuclear drama — particularly US allies like Japan and South Korea. But festering under the placid surface of Trump’s visit are serious fractures. Despite a veneer of unity, the Japanese and South Korean governments have divergent interests and major disagreements about how to deal with the North Korean dilemma. Both have a sizable influence on US policy toward the DPRK. And while South Korea’s position is at least worthy of critical support, Japan is taking an approach that is at best unhelpful — and may even be increasing the risk of war.

Abe’s Japan Trump’s trip confirmed that Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has emerged as the regional leader with arguably the most influence on US policy — in part because he isn’t above buttering up the notoriously vain Trump with MAGA-esque hats and flowery platitudes. Abe, who received a forty-eight-hour visit, twice as long as Trump spent with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, has been consistently dismissive of the diplomatic option, including in the US press, and reiterated during Trump’s trip that “now is not the time for dialogue.” Presented in US media as a reliable partner, free trade advocate, and staid political conservative, Abe’s popular image ignores the nationalism, even imperial apologism, that has defined his career and marks the party he now heads. Abe’s primary policy aim — amending Japan’s pacifist constitution to clear the way for greater military activities — is something of a legacy project. His grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, tried and failed to change the constitution during his tenure from 1957 to1960. Abe, the story goes, was inspired to take up the cause and has vowed to fulfill his grandfather’s dream of a robust, proud Japan. That all sounds relatively benign until you learn that Kishi also served in Hideki Tojo’s imperial cabinet as minister of commerce and industry — and helped oversee the brutal Japanese conquest of Manchuria. After World War II, seeing Kishi and the Japanese right as reliable bulwarks against communism, the US quickly made peace with its former enemies. While the US had imprisoned Kishi as a “Class A” war criminal for three years, they released him without charge. More importantly, the US used illicit CIA funding to help the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) become a dominant force in postwar Japanese politics. Kishi, a founding member, became prime minister with the full backing of the United States. In addition to his family ties, Abe’s nationalist exploits include paying a now infamous 2013 visit to the Yasukuni shrine, which memorializes imperial war criminals. The event was such a blatant insult to the Korean and Chinese victims of Japanese aggression that even the US had to express public disapproval of his actions. (While he hasn’t visited since, Abe continues to send regular offerings to the shrine, doing so as recently as last month.) And until her resignation this summer, Abe’s heir apparent in the LDP was former defense minister Tomomi Inada, a historical revisionist who does not regard World War II as a war of aggression and does not believe Korean “comfort women” were coerced into their roles. This is the company Abe keeps — and the sort of political leader he thinks should determine the future of Japan. Obviously, Abe would not go immediately rampaging through East Asia even if he won his coveted constitutional change. But the LDP’s victory in recent snap elections has brought its long-standing goal closer, and the DPRK’s nuclear ambitions — particularly the missile tests that have at times flown over Japan — have served as a compelling justification for what was once considered an impossible political lift. Backed by Trump and the mainstays of respectable punditry, Abe can now point to the regional security environment as a purportedly common sense reason for remilitarizing Japan. The US couldn’t be happier with the situation, of course, since it sees a rearmed Japan as a key element in containing North Korea (and increasingly, China) that would conveniently usher in billions in arms deals. In other words, Japan and the US are not incentivized to talk with the DPRK, since reduced tensions would undermine the rationale for constitutional change. In fact, Abe and Trump’s public pressuring of North Korea might be seen as a way of keeping these tensions heightened — promoting the cause of militarization without actually endorsing military action. Needless to say, this is an incredibly dangerous dance. Shirking diplomacy to cynically enable a military buildup in East Asia (for peace, of course!), the two nationalists may be edging the world closer to war.