On May 27, Barack Obama became the first sitting United States president to visit Hiroshima, the site of history’s first atomic attack on August 6, 1945. The Japanese Government did not ask Obama for an apology, nor did he offer one.

On December 27, Shinzo Abe will become the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor, site of the Japanese attack on the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941. The US Government has not asked Abe for an apology, nor is he expected to offer one.

Some Japanese citizens, especially those who survived or lost loved ones in Hiroshima, believe an American apology is warranted.

Some American citizens, especially those who survived or lost loved ones at Pearl Harbor, believe a Japanese apology is warranted.

Both groups are wrong. Few people are left to apologise to and none to offer an apology. The senior politicians and military figures of the Second World War, those who planned and ordered both attacks, are dead.

Shinzo Abe was born nearly 13 years after Pearl Harbor, Barack Obama just two days shy of 16 years after Hiroshima. Neither had anything to do with Pearl Harbor, with Hiroshima, or with the war the two countries waged against each other in between those terrible days.

Of the two, Abe has a better argument for declining to apologise: multiple Japanese governments have publicly apologised for, and in some cases paid reparations for, Japan’s aggression back then.

On the 70th anniversary of VJ-Day — the day the Second World War in the Pacific formally ended — Abe himself expressed regret for Japan’s aggression, but correctly spoke against continuing such gestures and against letting “our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologise”.

Beyond a certain point, apologies not only cease to be needed but become mere rituals rather than genuine expressions of contrition.

In America, the subject of “reparations for slavery” occasionally becomes a matter of interest. When it does, many quite correctly point out that there’s no one to pay such reparations, nor anyone to pay them to. Every American who was ever a slave owner, or a slave, is dead.

That is not entirely the case with respect to the Second World War, but it is nearly so. Now is the perfect time to stop endlessly demanding apologies from each other for past wars and instead join with each other in dedication to the prevention of the next war.

•Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Centre for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He lives and works in north central Florida