Abe in Pearl Harbor: "We Must Never Repeat the Horrors of War"

Prime Minister and Obama demand the strength of the US-Japan alliance, based on reconciliation.


At a time of new geopolitical tensions in Asia and doubts about the international order of the last decades, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday gave his own back to the war and celebrated his country's alliance with the United States . "We must never repeat the horrors of the war again," Abe said after visiting President Barack Obama's memorial to the dead in Pearl Harbor (Hawai'i) attack in 1941. Pearl Harbor, Abe and Obama agreed, should send the world a Message of tolerance and reconciliation.

Abe deposited a bouquet of flowers with Obama on the memorial of the USS Arizona, where are registered the names of the more than 2,400 Americans who died the attack.

"Here we remember that even when hatred burns harder, even when the tribal impulse is more primary, we must resist what makes us demonize those who are different," Obama said next to Abe.

"I can almost discern the voices of these sailors," said Abe. The Japanese prime minister offered condolences for the dead, but, as neither did Obama when he visited Hiroshima last May, he did not apologize.

Abe renewed the promise not to re-launch a war, one of the pillars of modern Japan. He emphasized the centrality of the alliance with the United States for the development and stability of his country.

The visit had a historical content: a gesture of reconciliation between the enemies of World War II, seven months after Obama visited Hiroshima, the city where the United States launched the first atomic bomb in 1945.

It was also a geopolitical gesture, an exhibition of the close relationship that both countries developed since the end of World War II. With Obama and Abe at the head - two very different politicians, the first a progressive internationalist; The second a right-wing nationalist - the relationship has experienced one of the most tuned moments.

Abe has been a key player in Obama's strategic turnaround to Asia, designed to counter China's boom. Both promoted, for example, the TPP, the free trade agreement with a dozen countries of the Pacific basin.

But the Asian twist has been half-way. The rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East and the war in Syria, and Vladimir Putin's expansionism of Russia, prevented him from devoting his full attention to the Asia-Pacific region.

And the victory of Donald Trump, a politician who won the November 8 elections by shaking xenophobia, leaves these movements in the air. In the election campaign Trump doubted the validity of the alliance with Japan. And it has already announced the US withdrawal from the TPP.

Abe will likely be the last foreign leader to meet with Obama before Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20. The message is powerful. For the place, Pearl Harbor, where the US suffered an attack that, as President Franklin Roosevelt said, was marked as a "day of infamy." And by the interlocutor, the prime minister of some of the most solid allies of the first world power.

"The alliance between Japan and the US is an alliance of hope," Abe said. "I wish our Japanese children, and President Obama, American children, and their children and grandchildren, and people around the world, to continue to see Pearl Harbor as the symbol of reconciliation."

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