Shinzo Abe made the world better

Abe laid the foundation for all of this by conjuring into being the famous “Quad,” or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, in 2007, during his first prime ministership. Abe did something that until then would have been considered very un-Japanese: He took the diplomatic lead. Recognizing China’s more belligerent turn earlier than almost anyone else, Abe enticed India into a formal security relationship with Japan—a first. He succeeded in gaining access to the Washington, D.C., security establishment, which was then preoccupied with the war in Iraq. He skillfully navigated the ambivalence in Australian attitudes toward China, which is a major customer for Australian products.

Through it all, Abe consistently advanced a vision of the Pacific region that was safe for democracy. He pressed Australia to sell uranium to India for India’s civilian nuclear program. He insisted that Taiwan was a crucial security interest for democratic nations in the Indo-Pacific. He championed an internationalist view of Japan’s interests, as part of a collective alliance with other democracies.

Abe overcame one obstacle after another. He overcame Japan’s predisposition to neutrality, which involved confronting political opponents who turned a need to atone for past Japanese war crimes into arguments against present-day military cooperation with Japan’s former victims. He overcame pro-Chinese attitudes on the Australian left that caused Australia to drop out of the Quad in 2008 under the China-leaning leadership of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, by facilitating its return under new leadership after 2010. Abe even cracked the code of Donald Trump’s Washington, arriving at Trump Tower in November 2016 for an early meeting with the president-elect at the same time as his government was negotiating business benefits for Trump’s daughter Ivanka—diplomacy with the U.S. during the Trump era was not for the squeamish, another thing Abe recognized earlier than most.