Opinion

A Japan-North Korea summit?

March 19, 2018

IF US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un can have a face-to-face meeting, why can’t Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hold talks with Kim?

Japan has no formal diplomatic relations with North Korea apart from occasional high-level talks concerning abducted Japanese nationals. Relations between the two are severely strained and marked by tension and hostility. But the leaders of these countries have not lobbed a series of insults at each other. Abe has not called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and Kim never referred to the Japanese leader as a “dotard”.

But is North Korea willing? We don’t know. All we know is that Japan has left the door open to a possible summit between Abe and Kim. This dramatic change in Tokyo’s attitude toward Pyongyang is the latest in a series of fast-paced diplomatic developments concerning East Asia.

The announcement came on Wednesday after the Japanese leader was briefed by Suh Hoon, the South Korean envoy who helped negotiate the US-North Korea meeting. As in the case of Trump-Kim summit, North Korea remains tight-lipped on the issue.

Japan says it is seeking a meeting with North Korean leader to discuss the matter of Japanese citizens kidnapped by Pyongyang’s agents decades ago. It is true that Abe won election on the back of calls for a tough line on North Korea and its Japanese abductions. He has repeatedly made it clear that he would not rest until all 13 of the people North Korea admitted to kidnapping have returned and divulges information about the others that Japan suspects were taken to train as North Korean spies.

But it is obvious that Abe has now an altogether different concern. Japan feels chagrined that it was not a party to the latest process of negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. Shouldn’t it have been as a member of the framework for six-party talks, a series of multilateral negotiations held intermittently since 2003 for the purpose of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program?

China, host of the six-party talks, was also not consulted by the US. But then China is not a US ally and does not have to worry about a North Korean attack, conventional or nuclear. More important, Japan stands to lose out if Washington and Pyongyang strike a deal that leaves the latter still able to threaten it. Japan is in range of North Korea’s short- and intermediate-range missiles. It was the victim of the world’s first nuclear attack. Its people know it is they as well as the South Koreans who are directly threatened by North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Washington’s main worry is that a nuclear-armed North Korea can’t be treated the way Iraq and Libya were. So nothing stops the Trump administration reaching a “deal” with the North on the banning of long-range missile development to remove a threat, possible or exaggerated, to the US.

Although Trump says Japan is “very happy with what I’m doing”, Tokyo is increasingly appearing as the odd man out after the dramatic developments of last fortnight. Abe feels the US should have coordinated its North Korean diplomacy in consultation with Tokyo and Seoul. This didn’t happen. Now Abe should make the best out of a bad situation to avoid the impression that his hardline stance on North Korean sanctions and nuclear program is alienating Japan.

The question is whether Kim would oblige Abe. Past history and current international situation would favor a possible thaw between Tokyo and Pyongyang. Contrary to the present hostility, links between the two have been maintained for a long period of time. In 2014, North Korea and Japan signed an agreement in Stockholm in which the North promised to launch a full-scale investigation into Japanese abductees. Kim may offer to reactivate the deal in return for some concessions from Tokyo on economic sanctions.


March 19, 2018
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