Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but in the very week that Shinzo Abe became Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, he resigned. The cause was the same that prematurely ended his first premiership, in 2007: chronic ulcerative colitis. Despite slumping polls, a stubbornly sluggish economy, and a nagging scandal over the 2016 sale of land for a school in Osaka, Abe nonetheless towered over Japanese politics since returning to the top office in 2012, and from that position he remained a staunch ally of the United States for nearly a decade. Losing that partnership just as the U.S.-Chinese geopolitical competition heats up is a worrisome prospect for Washington. Who will succeed Abe, whether Japan will slip back into political paralysis or instability, and whether the next leader will have as energetic a foreign and defense policy as their predecessor are the key questions facing not only Japan, but also its allies and competitors.
After three consecutive terms as prime minister and nearly eight years atop Japanese politics, it is difficult to remember how moribund Japan seemed when he retook office in 2012. Abe’s first resignation in 2007 had led to five more one-year leaders, including a stint in which Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost power for the first time since 1955 (apart from a very brief period in the early 1990s). From the ashes of his failed first term as prime minister, Abe turned himself into the most consequential Japanese politician since the power brokers Kakuei Tanaka and Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1970s and 1980s.
