Real Potential for Disaster : Tough Test for Bush as U.S.-Japan Relations Deteriorate

In talks with Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu today and Saturday, President Bush may find that the relatively easy ride that he has enjoyed in foreign affairs is over and that the hard part has begun.

For Kaifu is bringing more than Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama with him to Palm Springs. He’s bringing a lot of pent-up emotion and resentment from back home over congressional whining about Japan. If Bush breaks form, drops the kinder, gentler demeanor with which he has managed to waltz through so many foreign-relations problems and indulges himself in tough talk, Kaifu may bow politely, but that might not be the end of it. The Japanese can now insist on being treated as a full partner in world affairs. Domestic political pressure alone will prohibit Kaifu from allowing himself to be lectured to.

The problem is that Bush is under similar roiling domestic pressures--perhaps more so. Congress has saddled him with the “structural impediment” talks with Tokyo that are aimed at opening up Japanese markets. U.S. negotiators are under a gun to reach some kind of final accord in July. Good luck. “Structural impediments” were inspired as much by domestic polls that show Americans increasingly irritated with Japan as by real barriers to trade. As Fortune magazine has put it: “Suddenly the Japanese have become the people it is OK to hate.” As one U.S. senator said: “In a couple of years it will be as hard to be pro-Japanese in public as it was to be pro-Russian in the early ‘50s.” As the Economist, the influential London weekly, worried: “A whiff of McCarthyism is in the air.”

The problem is not only that real issues are involved--the Japanese market is less open than it could be to foreign investment and products, and the Japanese play Byzantine games to load the economic dice in their favor. But the Japanese question is now a huge political one--with each side increasingly distrustful of the other. The angry swirls of public opinion are starting to narrow politicians’ options to settle the trade differences rationally.

That’s why Bush was right to call for this meeting--and why it’s somewhat troubling that Kaifu brought his foreign minister with him but no economic or trade officials. Will Kaifu plead with Bush that without his technical advisers he can’t make concessions? It is a measure of the extent to which American officials now distrust the Japanese that the question of stalling can even be raised.

In some respects, Japanese-American relations are now Bush’s toughest foreign-policy challenge to date. He must be straight with Kaifu but not grandstand. And the prime minister must understand that the time for stalling is over and the latitude for rational discussion may be narrowing. If diplomacy fails, the economic war that has been the nightmare of all who care about good U.S.-Japan relations may then not be far off.