A surprise An-
nouncement
that poor health
was forcing his
resignation has
brought the
Shinzo Abe era
of Japanese politics to a close. The
race to succeed the country’s longest-
serving Prime Minister is on. A
front runner has emerged as the dom-
inant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
chooses a new leader. Chief Cabinet
Secretary Yoshihide Suga looks
like the man who will get the job.
If so, he’ll hold it until Abe’s elected
term ends in September 2021 or he
calls early elections and earns a fresh
mandate. Suga is not the
most dynamic candidate,
but he’s a longtime Abe
ally and broadly popular
within the party.
Inheriting a ship dur-
ing a storm, Suga in-
sists he’ll maintain Abe’s
course on both foreign and
domestic policy. Job one is
to steady Japan’s economy and stimu-
late growth. He’ll work to draw more
foreign investment, and he’ll promote
policies designed to buoy stock prices
and investor confidence.
Suga is an accomplished bureau-
cratic infighter who appears more
committed than Abe to some degree
of economic reform, and he has a track
record of taking on deeply entrenched
domestic interest groups. Most nota-
bly, he outmuscled Japan’s powerful
agricultural lobby to secure passage
of the Comprehensive and Progressive
Agreement of Trans -Pacific Partner-
ship, a massive trade deal abandoned
by the Trump Administration but
completed with Japanese leadership.
But the biggest change created by
this transition will be in relations with
other governments. For all his grand
ambitions, Abe was never able to
boost Japan’s place in the international
order. He failed in his bid to rewriteJapan’s constitution. He resolved none
of his inherited long- standing terri-
torial disputes with other countries.
Japan’s relations with South Korea re-
main deeply troubled, and China rep-
resents as great a threat as ever.If Abe wAs not a transformative
leader, he has been far from a failed
one. On his watch, Japan’s economy
continued to grow modestly from the
depths of the global financial crisis a
decade ago, until the COVID-19 pan-
demic hit. His policy of “Abe nomics”
helped pull the country out of a de-
flationary funk, even if public debt
remains at an eye-popping 251.91%
of GDP (2020 projections). Abe also
made real progress to-
ward opening up Japan’s
economy to foreign
investment and drawing
more women into
the workforce.
It’s in his role as Japan’s
international strategist in
chief that the world will
miss Abe most. Abe man-
aged to make Japan a more influential
international player by engaging in
frequent, face-to-face interaction with
foreign leaders. His relationship with
Donald Trump helped Japan avoid
much of the fire that the U.S. President
directed toward other allies. His out-
reach to Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi bolstered prospects
for an Indo- Pacific security frame-
work. Abe even managed to build
pragmatic baseline relations with
China’s Xi Jinping.
Among G-7 leaders, only Angela
Merkel has more experience. It has
been Merkel, making her exit soon,
and Abe who have fought in their dif-
ferent ways to defend a multilateral
international system under assault
from populists. At a time when the
world’s leading democracies are look-
ing to coordinate economic recovery
efforts and longer-term strategy to
China, experience is a vital asset. □THE RISK REPORT
The world will miss Abe’s
defense of the global order
By Ian BremmerIt’s in his role
as Japan’s
international
strategist in
chief that the
world will
miss Abe mostconstitutional rights to America’s most
vulnerable citizens, those without elec-
toral power. While progress has been
made, doctrines like qualified immunity
leave countless citizens without recourse
when they face state abuse. It alienates
citizens from the state and drains confi-
dence in the American republic.
That means diminishing presidential
power. A principal reason presidential
politics is so toxic is that the diminishing
power of states and Congress means that
every four years we elect the most pow-
erful peacetime ruler in the history of the
U.S. No one person should have so much
authority over an increasingly diverse
and divided nation.
The increasing stakes of each presi-
dential election increase political tension
and heighten public anxiety. Americans
should not see their individual liberty or
the autonomy of their churches and com-
munities as so dependent on the identity
of the President.
But beyond the political changes—
more local control, less centralization —
Americans need a change of heart.
Defending the Bill of Rights requires
commitment and effort, and it requires
citizens to think of others beyond their
partisan tribe. Defending the Bill of
Rights means that you must fight for oth-
ers to have the rights that you would like
to exercise yourself. The goal is simple
yet elusive. Every American—regardless
of race, ethnicity, sex, religion or sexual
orientation—can and should have
a home in this land.
Yes, many of our founders had pro-
found flaws. But their aspirations can
still be our aspirations. In the musical
Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda referred
to a biblical verse that George Washing-
ton used almost 50 times in his personal
and political correspondence. It comes
from the Book of Micah, it’s a promise of
both autonomy and peace that Washing-
ton used, for example, to include Jewish
Americans within the American prom-
ise, and its words echo today—“Every
one shall sit in safety under his own vine
and fig tree, and there shall be none to
make him afraid.”
French, a TIME columnist, is the author
of the new book Divided We Fall: Ameri-
ca’s Secession Threat and How to Restore
Our Nation
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