President Obama has no plans to apologize for the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima when he visits Japan later this month, the White House said Tuesday.
Spokesman Josh Earnest said that if someone interprets the trip as an apology, “they will be interpreting it wrongly.” He said the visit is focused on sending “a much more forward-looking” anti-nuclear proliferation message.
{mosads}Obama will become the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima on May 27 as part of a trip to Vietnam and Japan. He’ll meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said in a Medium post accompanying the announcement Tuesday that Obama would “not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb.”
Instead, Obama will “offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future” in brief remarks at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, a site dedicated to victims of the bombing.
“President Truman made this decision for the right reasons,” Earnest said Tuesday, mentioning national security and bringing an end to World War II while being mindful of the “human toll.”
Earnest said that given the “dilemma” of being in World War II and the “outcome” of dropping the bomb, “it’s hard to look back and second-guess him too much.”
While “it certainly is appropriate for historians” to look at the decision to drop the bomb, it won’t be a focus of the Obama trip, Earnest said, adding, “It’s hard to put yourself in that decision from the outside.
“I don’t think the president sees any benefit by trying to muzzle debate.”
Obama’s trip comes amid an intense presidential race during which Donald Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee, has called for replacing U.S. troops in Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons.
The White House in March said such a move would be “catastrophic.”
“I think the president has made his own views pretty clear,” Earnest reiterated Tuesday, emphasizing that the Hiroshima trip was meant to underscore a message of reducing nuclear stockpiles.
“The president intends to visit to send a much more forward-looking signal about his ambition for realizing the goal of a planet without nuclear weapons,” he said.