By PAUL KALLENDER-UMEZU
TOKYO — More political squabbling has stalled Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s quest to ease the ban on Japan’s ability to engage in collective defense, postponing the critical historic Cabinet decision to do so to the fall or beyond.
With his administration bogged down in a slew of other controversial but unavoidable subjects, including riding out a big tax hike and negotiating a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement this year, the process of lifting the ban could stretch into 2015.
Abe, a hawk within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who has made lifting the ban a central pillar of his security policy, had hoped his administration would approve the change by the end of the current Diet session ending June 22. Abe also supports reinterpreting Japan’s constitution and revising Japan-US defense cooperation guidelines.
After winning the Diet’s approval to lift the ban, Abe had then hoped by this autumn to push through legislation that would broaden Japan’s Self Defense Forces to allow collective self-defense rights, leading to a revision of US-Japan defense guidelines by December, said Corey Wallace, a Japan security policy expert at New Zealand’s University of Auckland.
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