{"text":[[{"start":4.68,"text":"During Tuesday’s brief summit between Donald Trump and Sanae Takaichi, the US president and Japanese prime minister are said to have exchanged “candid” views on the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. Quite how candid remains hazy, but the division of opinion is stark. So too, increasingly, are the fast-decaying terms of statecraft diplomacy between the US and what was once one of its closest friends. Traps of diminished sovereignty are being laid. And while Canada, the UK and others have their own versions of these to navigate, Japan’s route could be brutally instructive to all."}],[{"start":38.72,"text":"In her still relatively new role, Takaichi inherits Japan’s nation-defining faith in the force of supranational bodies like the ICC. Their flaws may be overlooked because the simple benefit of their existence seems vast. They are, to Japan, the vital struts of an international order on which its own economic, geopolitical and social vitality has completely depended."}],[{"start":60.52,"text":"Trump, meanwhile, shortly before meeting Takaichi, had used his speech to the UN General Assembly to condemn the ICC as “out of control” and to call on its 125 national members to “resign from this rogue institution immediately”."}],[{"start":75.56,"text":"Destroying the ICC, which Trump fears could conduct show trials of American military personnel, is now an undisguised presidential goal. In August, the US imposed sanctions on the president of the ICC, a highly respected Japanese judge and one in a long line of top legal minds (accompanied by generous funding) that Japan has sent to the court."}],[{"start":95.78,"text":"On a tightrope between domestic populism and US coercion, the best retort Takaichi could manage back then was that Trump’s sanctions were “very unfortunate”. She has since slightly firmed up her language, and it was modestly brave of her to use her own UN speech to note Japan’s “consistent support for” the ICC and other international bodies."}],[{"start":114.84,"text":"But Trump’s latest attack on the ICC lays bare Takaichi’s susceptibility to a new form of sovereignty trap. Where previously Japan has been coerced (by tariffs and other menaces) into ceding money, comfort and dignity, Trump’s demand that members quit the ICC calls on Japan to ditch its core philosophy on international institutions and participation in them. He wants it to yield, in other words, a key bit of Japaneseness."}],[{"start":141.2,"text":"The theoretical scope for coercion of Tokyo from Washington was always significant: Japan depends for security upon a protective umbrella provided by the US military and leans heavily on the US for its prosperity. But Trump has gone further than any president in the postwar period to show how limited Japan’s leverage really is."}],[{"start":160.64,"text":"For most of the past eight decades, the US-Japan relationship was defined by a balance of need: Asian regional security mattered enough to Washington for Japan’s defence requirements to be a load worth bearing. That balance has been replaced with asymmetry."}],[{"start":175.56,"text":"Trump’s apparent lack of interest in the region’s security means that Japan cannot assume that the US needs it as a partner anymore. At the same time, Japan probably needs the US more than ever — both economically and militarily. More fundamentally, the whole question of America’s needs is in flux. Trump’s recent pronouncements on the “loss” to America inherent in trade imbalances have come with broad assertions that the US no longer requires the outside world, and what it offers."}],[{"start":203.28,"text":"However deftly Takaichi can steer a 35-minute summit with Trump, the great risk is that the asymmetry ultimately forces Japan to take orders from its guarantor. That, inevitably, will reignite the rhetoric that China has deployed so provocatively in the past: that Japan is a mere “strategic vassal” of the US. Tokyo has always bridled at this accusation, not least because Japan has long been running a separate and also critical balancing act between itself and China. To make this work, it needs to project the appearance of robust, independent decision-making. But Trump’s actions are putting Japan in danger of making the barb rather closer to reality."}],[{"start":241.64,"text":"It is no coincidence that, having secured her own meeting with Trump just before he meets Xi Jinping, Takaichi blended declarations of unshakeable US-Japan unity with the apparent firmness of facing down Trump over the ICC. The problem, though, is that Trump will not stop taunting leaders like Takaichi with the prospect of a new relationship with distinctly vassal-esque properties. That is unacceptable. The rest of the world should hope that Japan not only dodges the trap, but proves that it can be done without sacrificing a relationship with the trap-maker."}],[{"start":273.8,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790235639_1306.mp3"}