Ahead of President Donald Trump’s second summit with a foreign leader since returning to the White House, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is scheduled to travel to the United States on Thursday.
With some 54,000 US military personnel based there, Japan is one of the United States’ closest allies in Asia.
As Trump’s “America First” approach threatens to infringe on the countries’ defense and commerce relations, Ishiba will be advocating for assurances regarding the significance of the US-Japan alliance.
He may also propose increasing imports of US natural gas, local media said, chiming with Trump’s plan to “drill, baby, drill” while boosting energy security for resource-poor Japan.
“The intention is to present a win-win value proposition from Ishiba to the president,” Sheila Smith, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP.
Also, “Japan has cut its liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from Russia. So Japan desperately needs to open up new sources of LNG, and other energy more broadly,” she said.
Trump will meet Ishiba in Washington on Friday — just days after a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where the US president sparked uproar with a proposal to take over the Gaza Strip.
The Japan summit could be less startling, Smith said, as Trump “has a fairly strong commitment to the alliances in Asia”.
“This is probably a very calm, cool reassurance meeting,” she said.
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