On the menu today: Just about every foreign leader on the globe is trying to figure out how to have a smooth relationship with Donald Trump, and today Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister, comes to Washington for his first face-to-face meeting with the president. In some ways, this is a feather in the cap of the Japanese, to be the second foreign leader meeting with Trump. But as we saw this week when Bibi Netanyahu visited, you never know what Trump is going to say or do at these meetings — and the personality difference between Ishiba and Trump is about as far apart as it gets. Read on for the stakes of this meeting and the potential bumps in the road for the U.S.–Japanese relationship. Plus, why your eggs are so expensive lately.
Mr. Ishiba Comes to Washington
Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba will meet with Donald Trump at the White House today, the second foreign leader to meet the president in this term, after Israeli Prime Minster Bibi Netanyahu.
When a foreign leader meets with a U.S. president, the visiting foreign ministry likes to have a clear gameplan for how the discussions will progress. Japanese leaders are traditionally formal and focused, and Ishiba is described as a “bookish” and “soft-spoken details man.” But with Trump, everyone knows the conversation can go in any direction; Netanyahu came to town, and Trump shocked the world by declaring, “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.”
Trump and Ishiba are scheduled to have a press briefing after today’s meeting. White House reporters refer to the post-meeting press conferences between a U.S. president as a foreign leader as a “two-and-two” because the event usually features two questions from the press for the U.S. president, two questions for the foreign leader. The joke going around the White House press corps is that Tuesday’s press conference with Netanyahu turned into a “two-and-20.”
For the Japanese government, there are just two broad goals in this meeting: Reaffirm the importance of the U.S.–Japanese relationship, and emphasize the eagerness to cooperate on shared goals, whether that’s bilaterally or multilaterally. It’s a meet-and-greet, with broad defense and economic issues on the agenda.
Trump hasn’t talked about putting tariffs on Japanese, but after the near enactment of tariffs on Canada and looming enactment next month, it’s clear that the president is willing to enact tariffs on any U.S. ally. Ishiba is likely to point to Japan’s status as the largest foreign investor in the U.S. for five straight years — reaching $988.7 billion in 2023, according to numbers from the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Nearly 1 million Americans are currently employed by Japanese companies.
Japan is the biggest foreign investor in ten states and the District of Columbia, and seven of them are red states: Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Japan is the second-biggest investor in 14 more, including three of last cycle’s key swing states, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. According to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, as of 2022, Japanese companies were the largest job creators in ten states and the second largest in six states, including 39,500 jobs created in the state of Michigan and 36,600 jobs in the state of Georgia.
In other words, Ishiba can point out that Japanese companies are employing gobs and gobs of Americans, and that there’s little value in starting a trade war with your biggest investor. Then again, the second-largest foreign direct investor in the U.S. is . . . Canada.
The Japanese government doesn’t expect Ishiba and Trump will discuss Nippon Steel’s attempt to purchase U.S. Steel. But something might be happening on that front; Trump met Thursday with U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt to discuss the proposed merger, which was blocked last month by then-President Joe Biden. Both companies have filed lawsuits against the U.S. government, arguing that election-year politics subverted a national-security review process. The two companies’ filing in the suit is deliciously scathing:
[President Biden] publicly announced his decision to block the merger before [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States]’s review even began. His March 14, 2024, formal, White House-issued “Statement from President Biden on US Steel” said: “I told our steel workers I have their backs, and I meant it. U.S. Steel has been an iconic American steel company for more than a century, and it is vital for it to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated.”
The President publicly reaffirmed that decision three separate times before receiving CFIUS’s analysis — leaving no doubt that his decision was predetermined and that the statutory national security review “process” was a sham. The President’s decision had nothing to do with national security: how could it when the national security evaluation had not even started?
Indeed, almost immediately after the review began, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen — the Chairperson of CFIUS — confirmed that the preordained outcome had nothing to do with national security, stating that she “certainly accept[s] the President’s view . . . that [U. S. Steel] should remain in American hands” for “the good of the workers in the country” even though the President “ha[d]n’t said specifically that it’s an issue of national security.”
The public record makes clear that the President’s decision was based on illegitimate and self-serving political considerations — a clear violation of the entire CFIUS process, which was created as an apolitical safeguard to protect national security.
Biden, Trump, and Kamala Harris all opposed the deal, in what appeared to be a shortsighted triumph of populist protectionist politics. As the Editors wrote in December:
U.S. Steel is not owned by the U.S. government, and Nippon Steel is not owned by the Japanese government. These are both publicly traded companies owned by their shareholders, who approved the acquisition after a bidding process took place. This result ought not be a concern for the federal government, or for conservative magazines. . . .
If a Chinese or Russian or Venezuelan state-owned company was buying out a defense contractor, the federal government would have a national-security case to intervene. That is not happening, nor is anything like it. In fact, there’s a case to be made that the deal will enhance national security by forging a stronger U.S.-Japan alliance against China and delivering a U.S. Steel more able to meet defense needs.
There is something glaringly contradictory about the current U.S. position that we want other countries’ companies to invest in America, to build factories here and employ Americans, but we don’t want Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel. All over the South and Midwest, Americans get up and go to work happily making automobiles for Toyota, but when it comes to U.S. Steel, all of a sudden we’re all back in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun.
Ishiba has some big shoes to fill. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, said the late Prime Minster Shinzo Abe had the best relationship with Trump of any foreign leader. In December, the then-president-elect and Melania Trump had dinner with Shinzo Abe’s widow Akie Abe at Mar-a-Lago; the South China Morning Post wrote that represented a “snub” of Ishiba.
Ishiba has wanted to meet Trump face to face for a while; according to the Japanese press, the Foreign Ministry reached out, hoping to add a meeting at Mar-a-Lago during his trip to the November G-20 meeting in Brazil, but the meeting with Trump never occurred.
If Trump’s dinner with Akie Abe was indeed a snub, this may well reflect the fact that while Ishiba and Abe are both in the same party, they were rivals for much of their political careers. The Japan Times summarized the dynamics between the two men when Ishiba rose to the position of prime minister:
The choice for lawmakers and party members in the run-off election became very clear. In Sanae Takaichi, whom Ishiba upset in the final vote, the LDP would have returned to its most successful strategy of recent years, the policies of Shinzo Abe. Instead, it has opted for the opposite.
It’s a jarring split with the past. The former defense minister — from 2007-2008 — has spent his recent career opposing the policies of Abe, after narrowly losing the decisive 2012 leadership race that paved the way for the latter’s historic spell in power.
In the intervening years, his opposition earned him few friends; indeed, he has a reputation for being a “traitor” due to his public criticism of party orthodoxy and his history of having left the group once. More conscious of this than anyone, Ishiba has said that his only shot at becoming prime minister would be if “destiny” chose him with the party in disarray.
That fortune has come to pass. Untainted by scandals and popular with the electorate, he makes sense as a choice for the party.
Because golf was such a big part of the Trump–Abe friendship, the now-common joke in those following U.S.–Japanese relations is that Ishiba should take up the habit of golf again, which he played in college. (In November, the South Korean presidential office told CNN that President Yoon Suk Yeol “recently began practicing golf again for the first time in eight years, in preparation for ‘golf diplomacy’ with President-elect Trump.” But as you likely noticed, Yoon Suk Yeol had a tumultuous December, got himself impeached, and is currently incarcerated in the Seoul Detention Center. My guess is he hasn’t had a chance to practice his long game much lately.)
There’s one other wrinkle to keep an eye on. Ishiba and Japan clearly want to maintain a good relationship with the U.S., but the Chinese are looking to exploit any sense of division between the U.S. and its most important ally in the Pacific. After Trump won the election, China hosted Japanese Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi in December, and Japanese officials characterized the Chinese attitude since November as a “charm offensive.”
Shin Kawashima, a professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Tokyo, writing in The Diplomat last month:
Beijing must view it as a positive that Ishiba does not have particularly strong ties to Taiwan, in contrast to, say, the former Abe faction known as the Seiwa kai. In early December, China sent a large delegation to Japan, including former Finance Minister Liu Wei and many other former ministerial and vice ministerial level delegates. The delegation exchanged views with their Japanese counterparts, after which Iwaya made his visit to China.
Not only is Ishiba carrying on the China policy of the Kishida administration in word, in deed too he seems to be more active than his predecessor in promoting dialogue. One reason for this is a desire to boost relations with Japan’s neighbors before Trump takes office. After all, Ishiba is likely to find it almost impossible to develop the close personal relationship with Trump that Abe did.
Second, in the realm of domestic Japanese politics, the Seiwa kai has since the start of the war in Ukraine moved closer to Taiwan and has more or less adopted a hardline stance on China. But the influence of this conservative force within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has diminished markedly, and at least within the party there are no longer any strong objections to improved relations with China.
Japan intends to host a meeting with the Chinese and South Korean foreign ministers in March.
We’re talking matters of degree here, but Xi Jinping’s regime is making a charm offensive to the Japanese government right as Trump is establishing his relationship with Ishiba. The stakes for today’s Friday afternoon meet-and-greet could be considerably higher than they appear.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, an explainer on why egg prices are so high. The short version: bird flu. The slightly less short version: The U.S. Department of Agriculture did such an effective job of helping defray the costs of poultry producers culling infected herds, they may have created a bit of a moral hazard and there may not have been enough of an incentive to prevent potential infections.