At any time in the 2,500-year history of Western diplomacy, has a head of state been advised by his host not to apologize for a long-ago act? I cannot think offhand of any instance until, apparently, two years ago.

According to a controversial leak provided by WikiLeaks — and picked up in stories by news outlets from AP to NPR — Barack Obama’s administration was politely advised by the Japanese in September 2009 that there would be no need for the presidential entourage to go to Hiroshima, apparently to apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb 64 years earlier.

If the story is true, Obama seemed intent on showing the world that his predecessors had long ago done wrong. The intended gesture was of a piece with his bowing to the Japanese emperor and his novel dispatching of a delegation to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing the following year.

The Japanese, if we can believe the leaked cables, called the proposed apology “a nonstarter” and stated that they feared blowback, in the form of encouragement for anti-nuclear and anti-American domestic forces — especially at a time when Japan is sensitive about its geostrategic vulnerability in a neighborhood that includes China, Russia, and North Korea. (Perhaps the Japanese would have preferred from Obama instead a stronger reiteration that they still reside safely beneath the U.S. defense umbrella.)

We can assume as well that the last thing the Japanese wanted was a sort of tit-for-tat cycle of apologies — given things like Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the 20 million Chinese dead, the Korean “comfort women” corps, and Unit 731.

A PATTERN HERE?
Unfortunately, Obama’s presidency has been characterized by a habit of apologizing for his country. Indeed, in his first year in office alone, he offered regrets to Europe for past U.S. “arrogance,” to the Muslim world for not being “perfect” in our prior relations, to Latin America for trying to “dictate our terms,” to Turkey for America’s slavery, segregation, and, apparently, genocide of the Native Americans, and, indirectly, to Iran for the Mossadegh coup (“the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” and thus, presto, there has been “a tumultuous history between us”). (more…)