Obama, Abe tout trade deal

“We really look at this visit in the context of our broader effort to continue to rebalance in the Asia-Pacific region. This has been one of our core foreign policy priorities throughout President Obama’s time in office,” Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, said Monday.

The visit by the leader of America’s closest Asian ally will include the first-ever address to a joint session of Congress by a Japanese prime minister. It helped that Abe — who served an earlier term of just a year and came back to power in 2012 after a succession of short-term prime ministers — has remained in office long enough for Washington to extend the invitation and schedule the elaborate trip. During Abe’s three-day swing through Washington, he will sit down with Obama in the Oval Office and attend a State Dinner held in his honor. He will address the legislative branch Wednesday.

He also met privately with Obama Monday and the two took a private tour of the Lincoln Memorial.

Abe, who was first elected prime minister in 2006 but left after one year for health reasons, has managed to stay in office for three years, ending a period of rapid turnover in Japan’s prime minister office.

Japan had seen five prime ministers come and go in between Abe’s first and second tours in office, all of them swept out of power for failing to rebuild Japan’s battered economy.

The Japanese public has grown weary of change and are putting their trust in Abe to jolt Japan’s economy out of its steady decline. His three-pronged approach, dubbed “Abenomics,” incorporates monetary easing, structural reforms, including changes to the labor market, and increased global opportunities through trade partnerships.

The prime minister’s trade plank dovetails with Obama’s pursuit of economic expansion in Asia and his desire for Congress to approve a major regional free trade agreement under negotiation between the U.S. and eleven other Pacific Rim countries.

Japan accounted for 14 percent or $146 billion of U.S. goods traded with Trans-Pacific Partnership members in 2012, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. And although the U.S. and Japan only account for a sixth of the group of nations negotiating the deal, they are the largest and third largest world economies, respectively, and account for nearly 80 percent of the economic output of the 12-member partnership.

The trade deal, Abe argues, offers Japan one last chance to remain an economic power in Asia for generations to come.

Like Obama, Abe is displaying a stubborn streak when it comes to pursuing the trade deal — willing to go against his usual base of support to secure it.

“[Abe] is very adamant about TPP and other parts of his domestic agenda,” Yuki Tatsumi, a senior associate at the Stimson Center, told the Washington Examiner. “Just like Obama, in a sense, Abe is undercutting his political support base — agriculture, large construction companies and public works contracts — to achieve it.”

“He’s willing to go after these policy goals even though it may come at the cost of his political base,” she added.

Both leaders also see the trade deal as a way to cement U.S. ties to the region in a race to head off China as the only dominant economic force.

“This is really about who will have long-term economic influence and what that will look like,” Tatsumi said. “Will there be fair competition and more transparency or is it going to be more of a Chinese style with less transparency and more currency manipulation?”

During Abe’s visit this week, U.S. officials don’t expect to announce any type of breakthrough with Japan on its negotiations over the outstanding issue of U.S. auto imports to Japan and protections for Japanese beef. Both countries are struggling to work through the very same issue that plagued trade talks in the 1980s but now there is more political will on each side to reach accommodations.

Facing a serious backlash within his own party on the trade deal, Obama in recent weeks has repeatedly warned that China will be all too willing to step into the vacuum if the U.S. fails to step up its economic role in Asia.

“If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” Obama said in an interview in the Wall Street Journal Monday. “We will be shut out — American businesses and American agriculture. That will mean a loss of U.S. jobs.”

On Monday, the two countries also addressed the military threat posed by North Korea and China by announcing an updated defense agreement. The pact would, among other things, allow Japan to act in America’s defense if U.S. assets are attacked in the region — something increasingly important considering North Korea’s nuclear capability and China’s military might.

With two free-trade GOP leaders in control of Congress right now and Obama pressing Democrats to fall in line, it’s no coincidence that Abe is will be the first Japanese prime minister to address a joint session of Congress.

During the speech, Abe will be forced to walk a fine line and focus most of his remarks on the success of Japan’s post-war democracy and diplomacy while briefly acknowledging the aggression his country showed during WWII.

Korean groups and others are calling on him to address the issue of wartime “comfort women” when Korean women during WWII were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese troops in front-line brothels.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest carefully sidestepped a question on whether Obama plans to press Abe on the issue during their meetings Tuesday.

Instead, Earnest stuck to this week’s script, emphasizing the importance of the U.S.-Japan postwar alliance.

Sixty-five to seventy years ago, he said, you would never see the flags of the U.S. and Japan flying side-by-side like they are in Washington this week.

“It speaks to the kind of reconciliation that’s possible between two — between two former adversaries,” he said. “That there’s an opportunity for us to set aside our differences and to try to pursue a more secure, peaceful future that benefits citizens in both of our countries.”