Abe and Japan
The assassination in broad daylight of Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan, while he was giving a speech during an election rally in the middle of the street, has shocked the world because it is fortunately a very rare occurrence. There have been fateful events that we would like to think belong to the past, such as the assassination of Empress Sissi in Geneva in 1898, or the assassination attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the Great War. Of course, there have been many other assassinations, such as those of Kennedy (1963), Allende (1973), Anwar el Sadat (1981) and Indira Gandhi (1984), to name but a few. Abe's is only the latest because history is stubborn and likes to repeat itself.
He came from an aristocratic family in which his mother was first lady of the Empress, and his grandfather, a military man, was convicted of war crimes in 1945. Abe was Prime Minister for four terms, the longest-serving in office in Japan, similar to our Felipe González, although the latter has always been a socialist, and Abe went from being a fierce nationalist like Putin or Trump or Xi, someone who always refused to explicitly condemn the barbarities and excesses of Japanese militarism in Korea and China, to an unabashed internationalist liberal, imbued with the greatness of his country and its role in Asia as part of a global alliance of democracies.
Abe convinced his compatriots to take a hard line on the threat posed by China's growth and to increase defence spending, now almost 2% of GDP, which was limited by a pacifist constitution imposed by the victorious Americans in 1947 after the defeat of the Japanese empire. He failed to change it, despite his efforts, but he did manage to draw up a National Security Strategy in 2013 and two years later the Parliament authorised the use of force on limited occasions, amid suspicions from China and South Korea, which still have not forgotten the excesses of Japanese soldiering in 1943 and are demanding apologies and reparations. As David Leonhardt has said, Abe succeeded in putting Japan back at ease with the use of military force, and that is a very important change in the current times and those on the horizon. Relations with Russia and China, never easy, are also complicated by disputes over the Kuril and Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands, which Abe has failed to bring to fruition. Indeed, talks with Moscow on the former have broken down following the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions adopted by Tokyo.
Abe was the inventor of the term "a free and open Indo-Pacific", which today the whole world accepts, and the inspiration behind the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) that unites Japan with the United States, Australia and India with the aim of containing Chinese expansion. Bringing India on board, leading it to abandon the non-alignment that has presided over its foreign policy since its very independence, must not have been an easy task, although the problems it has always had with China no doubt helped: they are too large, with 1.4 billion people each, very different political regimes, very rich histories, and too close to each other not to compete for influence in a shared environment. QUAD languished for years until it was rescued by Biden, who has already brought it together several times, because, while he's entertaining Ukraine, which is likely to lose him the Midterm elections because of rising gasoline prices, what really worries him is the rise of China.
Abe tried to rescue the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty, which Trump abandoned only because it was Obama's legacy, in a serious mistake that left Beijing free to rearrange trade in the area at will with its Regional Economic Partnership that excludes the US. Washington and Tokyo are now working together to prevent China's expansion into the Pacific islands (it has just made an agreement with Fiji), fearing that Beijing might try to install military bases there. He also made a strong case for clearer and firmer engagement by Washington with Taiwan. That is why, as Josh Roglin says, from a clearly American perspective, his greatest legacy is "to leave a world better prepared to confront China".
Domestically, he applied neoliberal recipes to overcome the traditional stagnation of the Japanese economy, with a combination of flexible monetary policies accompanied by economic stimulus that came to be known as "Abenomics" and which worked quite well because they reduced unemployment and inflation.
Retired from active politics due to illness, he remained an undeniable shadow power within his party, where he was called the "Shogun Maker", due to his prestige. The rejection of his assassination in Japanese society is likely to have contributed to his party's landslide victory in last week's elections, and this will undoubtedly influence the first years of his successor Fumio Kishida's term in office, who will have to rely on his legacy as he seeks his own path.
Jorge Dezcallar, Ambassador of Spain