Japan’s Shinzo Abe heads to the Middle East to help ease U.S.-Iran tensions. Japan will send a naval destroyer to the region in February.
Japnese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has kicked off a five-day trip to the Middle East as part of Tokyo’s efforts to help reduce tensions after tensions escalated between the United States and Iran last week.
He will be visiting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – the countries that Japan considers key players in stabilizing the situation in the Middle East, according to the Japanese officials.
“Japan will take its own initiative to tenaciously conduct peace diplomacy so as to ease tensions and stabilize the situation in the region,” Abe told media.
In Riyadh, Abe held meetings with Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. King Salman expressed hopes that his country and Japan will deepen their strategic partnership in various fields, not only in the area of energy. Saudi Arabia is the top crude oil supplier to Japan, accounting for about 39% of Japan’s overall crude imports.
The visit comes ahead of Tokyo’s deployment of Self-Defense Forces (SDF) personnel, patrol aircraft and other assets to the region to help secure the safe passage of shipping by enhancing intelligence-gathering capabilities. Abe wants to win support from the three countries for the dispatch of a Navy destroyer and other aircraft to the region to secure safe passage for the Japanese ships in the Middle East, from which Japan gets nearly 90 percent of its crude oil.
The same day, two Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) P-3C aircraft took off from Naha Air Base in Okinawa Prefecture to ensure the safety of Japanese ships navigating waters in the Middle East. The P-3Cs will be based in Djibouti in eastern Africa, where the SDF has set up a temporary base for international anti-piracy operations. They will patrol three bodies of water: the Gulf of Aden, the northern Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. The cruising range of the P-3C is nearly 6,700 km.
The P-3C aircraft will begin patrolling waters in the Middle East from January 20. The MSDF destroyer Takanami with a crew of about 200 will depart on February 2.
Although the U.S. is Japan’s main ally, however, Tokyo has been successfully engaged in a balancing act between Washington and Tehran.
