Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba to skip NATO summit

Tokyo, Japan - Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has cancelled plans to attend the NATO summit in the Hague this week, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday, scrapping his June 24-26 trip just three days after announcing it.

The ministry said only that "various circumstances" had led to the cancellation.

Fuji Television reported that Ishiba was pulling out because a planned meeting between NATO and the group of four Indo-Pacific nations (IP4) was not likely to take place, and because a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump was also unlikely.

South Korea and Australia, which along with Japan and New Zealand, make up the IP4, have also said their leaders would not attend. Trump had wanted to hold a summit meeting with the IP4, a source told Reuters previously.

While Japan's Ishiba will not make the trip, its Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya will travel to the Netherlands to attend NATO-related functions and hold bilateral meetings, the ministry said in its statement.

Japan's leader has attended every North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit since 2022, when the country was first invited to participate following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The foreign ministry had announced Ishiba's attendance three days ago, saying he was set to "reaffirm with NATO allies and others the recognition that the security of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific is inseparable."

(Reporting by Yoshifumi Takemoto; Writing by Satoshi Sugiyama and Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Hugh Lawson)