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The two met in Washington for more than two hours on Monday evening, Japan's cabinet secretariat said in a statement Tuesday. They had frank, in-depth discussions toward achieving a mutually beneficial agreement, the statement said, while adding that Japan still aims to protect its national interests.
Akazawa is in the US capital for an eighth round of trade talks with his US counterparts — negotiations that have so so far produced no concrete results since they began in April. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is under renewed pressure to secure reprieves before the Aug. 1 deadline, following his ruling coalition's historic election loss on Sunday.
Barring a deal, universal tariffs on Japan's exports to the US are set to rise to 25% on Aug. 1, up from the baseline 10% and an original 24%.
Asked about how the election results could affect talks with Japan, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent deflected the question on Monday.
'Our priorities are not the internal workings of the Japanese government,' Bessent said on CNBC. 'Our priorities are getting the best deal for the American people.'
During his trip to Japan last week when he led the US delegation's visit to the World Expo in Osaka, Bessent said that a mutually beneficial agreement between the two nations remains a possibility. He added that a good deal is more important than a rushed one.
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New York Post
9 minutes ago
- New York Post
Trump, European Union Commission prez give ‘50-50′ chance of striking trade deal after Scotland meeting: ‘Rebalancing'
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NBC News
10 minutes ago
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10 minutes ago
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Volodymyr Zelensky built a mythic reputation as a lonely bulwark against global tyranny. On Tuesday, the president of Ukraine signed that reputation away, enacting a law that gutted the independence of his country's anti-corruption agencies just as they closed in on his closest political allies, reportedly including one of his longtime business partners and a former deputy prime minister. To justify the decision, he cloaked it in an invented conspiracy, insinuating that Russian moles had implanted themselves in the machinery of justice. This is a scoundrel's playbook. Despite the ongoing war, Ukrainians swamped the streets of Kyiv in protest of their president's betrayal of democracy, forcing Zelensky to introduce new legislation reversing the bill he had just signed into law. It was a concession of error—and possibly an empty gesture, because the new bill is hardly a lock to pass the legislature. That Zelensky brazenly weakened Ukraine's anti-corruption guardrails in the first place shouldn't come as a shock. They were erected only under sustained pressure from the Obama administration as part of an explicit bargain: In exchange for military and financial support, Ukraine would rein in its oligarchs and reform its public institutions. Over time, the country drifted, however unevenly, toward a system that was more transparent, less captive to hidden hands. But in the Trump era, the United States has grown proudly tolerant of global corruption. In fact, it actively encourages its proliferation. Beyond the president's own venal example, this is deliberate policy. Brick by brick, Donald Trump has dismantled the apparatus that his predecessors built to constrain global kleptocracy, and leaders around the world have absorbed the fact that the pressure for open, democratic governance is off. Anne Applebaum: Kleptocracy, Inc. 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Listen: The kleptocracy club By stripping anti-corruption from the moral vocabulary of American foreign policy, Trump is reengineering the global order. He's laying the foundation for a new world in which kleptocracy flourishes unfettered, because there's no longer a superpower that, even rhetorically, aspires to purge the world of corruption. Of course, the United States has never pushed as hard as it could, and ill-gotten gains have been smuggled into its bank accounts, cloaked in shell companies. Still, oligarchs were forced to disguise their thievery, because there was at least the threat of legal consequence. In the world that Trump is building, there's no need for disguise—corruption is a credential, not a liability. Zelensky is evidence of the new paradigm. Although his initial campaign for president in 2019 was backed by an oligarch, he could never be confused for Bolsonaro or Netanyahu. He didn't enrich himself by plundering the state. But now that Trump has given the world permission to turn away from the ideals of good governance, even the sainted Zelensky has seized the opportunity to protect the illicit profiteering of his friends and allies. Yet there's a legacy of the old system that Trump hasn't wholly eliminated: the institutions and civil societies that the United States spent a generation helping build. In Ukraine, those organizations and activists have refused to accept a retreat into oligarchy, and they might still preserve their governmental guardians against corruption. For now, they are all that remain between the world and a new golden age of impunity.
