Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is visiting US president Donald Trump this week, their seventh meeting since Trump’s 2016 election victory. China is almost always in the room when the United States and Japan meet, and especially since Xi Jinping, the president, came to power in 2013. Abe needs Trump to counter Beijing, and so the Japanese leader will have to overlook much about Trump’s behaviour. On trade, the United States’s problems with China today are similar to those it faced with Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. Both China and Japan have run large, intractable surpluses, vis á vis the US, for decades, the basis for Trump’s Japan criticism during his campaign.

Source: Irish Examiner April 18, 2018 23:03 UTC