G7 Foreign Ministers Meet in Hiroshima — Will They Condone Obama’s Nuclear Threat to China?

John Kerry is in Japan for the annual G7 Foreign Ministers meeting (Obama will attend the G7 Summit next month, near Hiroshima). Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said today that maritime security will be among the leading issues on the agenda.

Kerry and the others will visit the museum dedicated to Harry Truman’s nuclear obliteration of the city on April 11, the first U.S. Secretary of State to do so. An unnamed U.S. official told Reuters there would be no apology for the genocidal atrocity, for which Gen. Douglas MacArthur had said there was absolutely no need.

And yet Kishida appears ready to discuss Obama’s drive for a new Asian war, this time against China, with Japan again on the imperialist side against China. China’s Xinhua editorialized April 9 that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government “has been trying to place the South China Sea on top of the agenda at the upcoming two-day meeting in Hiroshima, despite pressing issues of combating terrorism and extremism, and the refugee crisis troubling Europe and the Middle East.” They quote Wang Shaopu, director of the Japan Study Center with the Shanghai Jiaotong University: “Japan over the recent years has been actively adapting itself to the United States’ strategy of Rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific in order to build deterrence against China.” The editorial warns that “hyping up the issue at the G7 platform is also Japan’s attempt to sow discord between China and major European countries,” and to “win international and domestic support for the revision of its constitution this year to allow the country to declare war.”

On April 8, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned “relevant parties” not to put the territorial controversies into the G7 summit.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, ahead of the meeting today, called for Russia to be returned to the G8. He told Germany’s DPA that “I wish the G7 format didn’t last long and that we provided conditions to return to the G8.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Japan a few days after the G7, and Abe is scheduled to visit Moscow in May.