Obama To Apologise For Hiroshima?

If he does, then it will be yet another example of how he is a paleocon at heart. In the tradition of Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War. Of refusal to enter the Second World War until actually attacked by either side. Of Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex. Of Nixon’s pursuit of détente with China. Of the ending of the Vietnam War by him and Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee. Of the only conservative thing that Reagan ever did, to begin nuclear arms reduction in Europe. Of Republican opposition to Clinton’s global trigger-happiness. And of the only conservative thing that George W Bush ever did, to remove American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil. That tradition now subsists in Barack Obama and his Administration.

It is an outside bet, but if anything could make the Japanese apologise at long last, even though no doubt far from immediately, then it might be this. We are not in the position that they are; I have an uncle by marriage, now in his late eighties, who still won’t have any Japanese appliance in his house. But on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are on shaky legal and frankly non-existent moral ground: using WMD, necessarily and inescapably indiscriminate as they are, is at least probably illegal, and is certainly immoral. If Obama neutralises this one, then he takes away the key Japanese argument. “What about your atom bombs?” becomes “Well, what about them?”

This is far from academic. China, with a very non-belligerent five thousand year tradition vastly predating either Communism or her new-found capitalism, nevertheless maintains her sheer scale of military spending in no small measure because she fears that Japan, being unrepentant about the last time, may very well have a next time. The issue is also very live in, if anything even more Confucian, South Korea. And, of course, in North Korea. Why else has North Korea the Bomb? It is not to attack Europe or America. It is to warn off Japan. Why? Because Japan has never admitted what she did to Korea in the Thirties and Forties.

So do a classically Christian-conservative thing and apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were entirely outside the just war tradition as all WMD use is, and then say to the Japanese, “Over to you”. Nagasaki, as the principal centre of Christianity in Japan, is a particularly stark example of the huge problems raised by the taking up of arms against brothers and sisters in common baptism. And thus, it follows, against any children of the Triune God in Whose Name we are baptised. Which is to say, all human beings without exception.

Can Obama pull it off? I certainly hope so. And, not least because he himself can play the Hawaiian and Indonesian cards, I cannot see why not.