Aurora Macro Japan Report: Ishiba’s Trump Challenge 

Japan-U.S. Summit in the Works

• Japan’s government confirmed on Monday, 3 February that Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru will travel to the United States on 6 February for a 7 February summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, his first meeting with the president.
  
  
• The prime minister and members of the government have publicly discussed the summit as an opportunity to build a personal relationship between the two leaders, reaffirm the new U.S. administration’s commitment to strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance (and fulfilling its obligations to defend Japan), and signal Japan’s interest in investing in and importing more energy from the U.S.
  
  
• Ishiba is also expected to broach closer bilateral cooperation in high-tech sectors, including artificial intelligence (Ishiba met with Softbank’s Son Masayoshi and OpenAI’s Sam Altman on Monday) and semiconductors.
  
  
• Behind the scenes, however, the Ishiba government is taking extra care ahead of the summit. As foreign minister Iwaya Takeshi said in a speech to supporters in his constituency last week, “President Trump has signed various executive orders, but we must gather and analyze intelligence on what is policies will ultimately be, express Japan’s opinions candidly, and through the U.S.-Japan alliance make a better world.”
  
  
• The prime minister has been meeting with senior officials across the government to discuss possible scenarios for the summit, in what has been referred to as a “Trump strategy council.” The Ishiba government is trying to determine what Trump might demand, whether in terms of trade or exchange rate concessions, defense spending, or host-nation support for U.S. forces, since the U.S. relationship with Japan seems to be a lower priority for the U.S. administration than its relationships with Canada, Mexico, or the European Union.
  
  
• At the same time, the meeting, which Ishiba had unsuccessfully sought before Trump’s inauguration, is particularly risky for the prime minister. Indeed, Trump’s decision to threaten tariffs on a close ally like Canada may make Ishiba’s task harder. The tariffs threat against Canada confirms that the range of potential outcomes in the bilateral relationship under the Trump administration is greater. It illustrates that there is no safety in an old, institutionalized alliance relationship, and demonstrates a serious threat to the global trade status quo, upon which Japan’s companies have long depended.

Ishiba and the Home Front

• Meanwhile, how Ishiba handles his relationship with Trump will also draw intense scrutiny and carries immense risks for Ishiba’s standing at home. If he is overly ingratiating, he will face consequences by lawmakers (and perhaps not just opposition lawmakers) in the Diet.
  
  
• In the week since parliamentary deliberations began in earnest, the prime minister has already faced questions about how he intends to approach Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Paris climate accord, his administration’s recent tariffs diplomacy, and the Trump administration’s broader approach to the world order and the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept. He will undoubtedly face further questioning about these issues following the summit.
  
  
• Japanese media will be watching closely how Trump addresses Ishiba (what his body language looks like, whether he uses his first name, etc.), and if he is unable to receive assurances from Trump on key issues. Ishiba could come home not only to an uproar on the LDP’s right, which is already dubious about Ishiba’s abilities as a statesman and his government’s tilt to China, but also from the broader public, which is uneasy about the direction of the bilateral relationship and could penalize Ishiba for failing to secure solid reassurances from the U.S. president.
  
  
• For Ishiba, a successful summit will be a boring summit. Ishiba can declare the summit a success if he can get Trump to:
  • reaffirm the U.S. security guarantee through Article V of the mutual security treaty (including its applicability to the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands);
  • acknowledge or praise Japan’s ongoing plans to raise defense spending and encourage investment in the U.S.;
  • pass trade and currency issues to ministerial-level talks, avoiding significant bilateral tariffs for the time being;
  • make gestures towards resolving extant issues related to North Korea’s abductions of Japanese nationals, preserving the Quad, broader regional security cooperation.
    
    
• A successful summit will at best be a temporary reprieve for Tokyo, buying the Ishiba government more time to develop a strategy for managing the uncertainty ahead. It will still have to navigate a series of actions from the new U.S. administration that have undermined its credibility, whether its ambiguous signals about its approach to China; its hostility to traditional U.S. allies and multilateral institutions; its preoccupation with a controversial and increasingly unpopular domestic agenda; and its willingness to use economic coercion to achieve political and diplomatic goals.
  
  
• Meanwhile, what the above wish list reveals is that after the Kishida and Biden administration advanced a vision of a global partnership that worked in multiple regions and across a variety of issue areas, the relationship will be more inward looking, not unlike during the first Trump administration, when discussions focused more narrowly on bilateral security and economic issues.

All best, 

Tobias and the Aurora team.

To book a meeting with me to discuss these or any other Aurora themes contact juliet@auroramacro.com

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