By Mina Pollmann
Putin, Park, and peacekeeping: recapping Shinzo Abe’s busy week in New York.
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York is an opportunity for countries around the world to put their best foot forward, and hopefully win accolades as a “peaceful,” “responsible,” and/or “insert-adjective-of-your-choice” power. After wrapping up this weekend, world leaders are headed home now with a scorecard of wins and losses to explain to their domestic publics. For Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, his stint at UNGA was overall positive, but it is questionable whether any of his diplomatic victories were substantive or are sustainable.
What did Abe accomplish? He had a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, informally talked with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, and caucused with the leaders of Germany, Brazil, and India to push for UN Security Council (UNSC) reforms. Each of these meetings are an important step forward, but really only foreshadow future accomplishments instead of being meaningful in and of themselves. His pledge to increase aid for countries around the world was met with predictable appreciation, while his refusal to take in any refugees elicited predictable cynicism. Perhaps the most important win for Abe, and one that he cannot directly claim credit for, is that the highly controversial security bills that just passed in Japan also survived unscathed.
The meeting between Abe and Putin is important because it led to an agreement to restart peace talks, and Putin accepting an invitation to visit Japan. Though Abe’s willingness to wait for “when the timing is best” for Putin’s visit indicates he is not tied to realizing the visit this year, there is eagerness in Japan to restart negotiations. Protecting Japan’s territorial integrity is an important issue to Abe and his base of conservative supporters, and so progress on the dispute with Russia on the Northern Territories would dovetail nicely with Abe’s overall agenda – if there is progress. From the Russian side, they want to keep peace talks separate from negotiations over the islands; as Russia holds the upper hand, manifested through economic development and political visits to the islands, it is not quite clear what Japan can realistically get from negotiations. So, yes, Abe’s meeting with Putin was critical, as relations had been frosty since the Ukrainian crisis, but it will be an uphill battle from here to achieve Abe’s objective of recovering the Northern Territories. Senior level talks on the territorial issue will resume on October 8, after having been suspended since January 2014.
Read the full story at The Diplomat