hankyoreh

It was early this year that the US first started taking Japan’s side in its historical conflicts with South Korea. When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced at a New Year’s press conference in early January that he would be including reflection on war and ways of contributing to Asia and the world in a statement by Abe to be produced in August, the US praised it as a “constructive” move. Even Abe’s recent reference in a Washington Post interview to comfort women survivors as having been “victimized by human trafficking” was seen in the US as a positive signal, as the category also included victims of sexual slavery. The US assessment has been that Abe is showing some level of good faith on historical issues.

It’s a situation that also explains why signs of pressure on Tokyo - such as US President Barack Obama‘s description of the comfort women issue last year as “shocking” - have been missing in 2015. Instead, Washington seems focused on sending the message that it is time for South Korea (and Japan and the US) to put the past behind it and work together toward the future, as recent remarks by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter have indicated.

One reason for the change from the US appears to be impatience from Obama, who has roughly one year and nine months left in his term. Nearly four years have gone by since he announced “rebalancing Asia” as a key diplomatic policy framework, yet with nothing to show in the way of clear results. The policy ostensibly involves moving Asia front and center in military, diplomatic, and economic terms. In practice, however, its aim is to contain a rising China. It shares many features with the “balance of power” strategy that has been the US’s traditional foreign policy approach: avoiding threats to the homeland by refusing to tolerate dominant powers in specific regions. As the recent establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) shows, however, the US is now showing the limits of its capacity to hold China back.

The situation explains the context for the perception in and around Washington that the years-long conflict between its top two East Asian allies South Korea and Japan over historical matters is no longer something it can ignore. Washington’s vision involves strengthening trilateral security cooperation militarily as a bulwark against China - but frictions between Seoul and Tokyo have gotten in the way. In that sense, the US is quite happy to see Abe moving to serve as a solid “proxy” in East Asia with stronger collective self-defense authority and beefed-up armaments.

Abe is now planning to visit the US on Apr. 26, where he is expected to make important decisions of two matters involving strategic interests: amendment of the US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines, and conclusion of a deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). According to reports, coordination of positions on the guidelines is mostly complete. Speaking in an Apr. 8 interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Carter said the US “welcomes and supports Japan’s efforts to play a more proactive role in contributing to peace and security both in the region and around the world.”

But it remains uncertain for now how much of a concession Tokyo is willing to make to seal a deal on the TPP. Washington was previously anxious about Tokyo’s failure to give the answer it wanted on the TPP even after an Apr. 2014 visit by Obama, who pledged US defense of the disputed Senkaku Islands (called Diaoyu in China).

Compared to other issues of strategic interest, the South Korea-Japan historical conflict is of secondary importance to the US. The mainstream of the US public sees the issue as fundamentally having nothing to do with them. Indeed, it may be safe to say that only a handful of historians and conscientious intellectuals in the country are aware that the US helped contribute to the current conflict with the 1905 Katsura-Taft agreement, which recognized Japanese colonial rule over Korea in exchange for recognition of US rule over the Philippines, and the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco, which sowed the seeds for the Dokdo dispute.

By Park Hyun and Gil Yun-hyung, Washington and Tokyo correspondents

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]