Japan and South Korea are making plans to secure a top-level meeting with the next U.S. president after the Nov. 5 election, when multiple leaders gatherings will be held in the Americas.
With polls showing a tight race between Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump, each embassy has two plans: for its country’s leader to either visit Harris in Washington or visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Japan’s next prime minister, who will be picked Sept. 27 in the presidential election of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, will travel to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meeting in Peru around Nov. 15-16, and then the Group of 20 summit in Brazil on Nov. 18-19.
It is after the G20 gathering that Japan hopes its new prime minister can visit the U.S. to meet with the president-elect, a Japanese Embassy official told Nikkei Asia.
An official at the South Korean Embassy in Washington also confirmed that Seoul is seeking a meeting with Harris or Trump “as soon as possible.”
Both countries are taking a page from the 2016 playbook of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who that November was the first world leader to visit Trump at Trump Tower in New York, nine days after the businessman’s electoral victory.
This early visit, in which Abe presented the president-elect with a golden Japanese golf club, is said to have contributed to Trump’s close relationship with Abe.
While incumbent Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is not running in the LDP presidential race, he is making a final trip to New York the week of Sept. 22 to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
Kishida is set to have a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden, to join a summit of the Quad — together with the U.S., India and Australia — and possibly to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But he will not give a speech to the U.N. itself, according to the embassy official.
Japan has reportedly been allocated a speaking slot in the afternoon of Sept. 26, but Kishida will have to fly back to Tokyo to vote in the LDP race before then. Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa is considering to run for LDP president and will not be available as alternate speaker. That role will likely go to Japan’s ambassador to the U.N., Kazuyuki Yamazaki.
The next Japanese prime minister will immediately face a jam-packed diplomatic calendar. After forming a cabinet and giving a speech to the parliament, the new leader will be beckoned to attend the ASEAN summit and related meetings in Laos from Oct. 6 through Oct. 11, followed by the leaders meetings in South America.
An official at the Indian Embassy said that India is “actively” pursuing a meeting with the two U.S. presidential candidates but did not say whether such a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi would happen before or after the inauguration in January.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to have a telephone call with Biden before the election, but plans are not clear for direct engagement at the APEC and G20 summits, which Xi is expected to attend.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters in Beijing on Thursday that both Biden and Xi are likely to be at APEC and G20 and that if so “it would only be natural for them to have the chance to sit down with one another.”
“We’ll have to await any confirmation or any announcements, but I think things pointing in that direction seem logical and reasonable,” Sullivan said.
A Chinese official told Nikkei Asia that it was Biden who requested the phone call with Xi in the coming weeks and that the U.S. leader values his personal relationship with Xi, owing to the mutual visits they made while vice president around a decade ago.
Rick Waters, managing director of Eurasia Group’s China practice, raised another possibility. “It is theoretically possible that if Harris wins, she could go to the [G20] Rio summit instead of Biden,” he said.
And “whoever the U.S. sends will probably do a [bilateral] with the Chinese,” Waters said.
Rorry Daniels, managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said a Harris meeting with Xi at an early date would send a positive signal.
“How stabilizing would that be, if there was a situation in which, Harris was a clear winner, APEC is then happening, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both meet with Xi Jinping and have an official passing of the baton?” Daniels asked.
“That would be highly stabilizing and reassuring, not just to the U.S. and China, but to the rest of the world that these two major powers can continue to forge this stabilized relationship,” she said.
But Daniels said the Chinese side would be reluctant to signal any such intention, even over a meeting with Biden at the G20, until the election is over. “There’s opportunity costs for the Chinese of meeting with Biden if the Democrats are on the way out of the door,” she said.
Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told Nikkei Asia: “Head-of-state diplomacy plays a leading role in the development of China-U.S. relations.”
“No matter who is elected president of the United States, China will, in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, promote the stable, healthy and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations,” he said.
A potential Xi-Harris meeting on the sidelines of the APEC or G20 gatherings would add a new twist to the diplomatic jockeying. Japan has long been sensitive about American leaders putting China ahead of Japan. In 1998, when then-U.S. President Bill Clinton visited China without making a stop in Japan, the incident was labeled “Japan passing” in Japanese media and treated as a diplomatic crisis.
