Perhaps the most visionary statesman of the 21st century, Shinzo Abe was shot and killed in the city of Nara while delivering a speech on the campaign trail. The former Japanese prime minister’s brutal assassination, at the hands of a man said to be dissatisfied with his leadership, left the world in shock. But his murder will not erase the legacy of his deft management of a country experiencing chronic stagnation and his strategic insight into how to counter the growing threat from China.
The first time Abe, a member of Japan’s political aristocracy and grandson of a former prime minister, took to the job for which he will be remembered, he survived in it barely over a year. But during that stint in power, he laid the groundwork for a geopolitically consequential understanding of Asia, one that is shaping the West’s clash with the Chinese Communist Party. “Now, as this new ‘broader Asia’ takes shape at the confluence of the two seas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” he said, addressing India’s parliament in August 2007, “I feel that it is imperative that the democratic nations located at opposite edges of these seas deepen the friendship among their citizens at every possible level.” That speech, delivered just a month before he resigned amid cascading corruption scandals in his cabinet, was the foundation of a new, critical quasi-alliance system linking the countries capable of resisting Beijing’s designs on the region.
When he returned to power in 2012, he stayed there for eight years, making him Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and ending an era of political instability under various opposition governments. Abe oversaw a signature Abenomics economic-reform program and took steps to shake Japan out of its slump, with varying results, and implemented social policies that some on the right consider as a guide of sorts. Overall, he was a staunch conservative and a nationalist, and embraced a healthy pride in his country, without shying away from acknowledgement of Japan’s dark history of military aggression. He addressed Congress in 2015, the first Japanese leader to do so, speaking about “a miracle of history,” which is that “Enemies that had fought each other so fiercely have become friends bonded in spirit.” A savvy diplomat, he had the sort of personal range that made for both a successful, solemn joint visit to Hiroshima with Barack Obama and the ability to hit the links with Donald Trump.
In the U.S. and beyond, he’ll be primarily remembered for how he steered his country from its post–World War II-era pacifism toward a more proactive stance better-equipped for deterring a new aggressor-to-be with imperial aims. In an important expression of his vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Tokyo, Washington, New Delhi, and Canberra revived in 2020 the Quad Grouping, a security and diplomatic arrangement that in its latest iteration is about countering the Chinese Communist Party in everything but name.
To the extent that Abe elicited controversy at home and faced difficulty in winning support for his political program, one notable cause was his drive to grant Japan the ability to stand up and maintain a proper military — the only true bulwark against the three menacing dictatorships on its doorstep. He recognized that, in a dangerous world, interpreting Japan’s post-war constitution to only maintain a limited self-defense force, however capable, would hold Japan back, limit its alliance with the U.S., and thus leave the country, and its allies, vulnerable. Unilaterally, he was able to reinterpret the constitution to allow Japan to come to its allies’ defense and bulk up the self-defense force with de facto aircraft carriers. The main goal, however, of revising Article Nine of the constitution to permit a standing military remained elusive as Abe stepped down in 2020, citing his chronic health issues.
The world has lost an impressive statesman. Abe was said to harbor ambitions for yet another run at the premiership. Now, it will fall to others to take up his legacy.