With his positions, especially in the defense of Taiwan, the former prime minister was considered a adversary by the Chinese. India loses an ally in building an anti-Chinese front. The Russians shouldn’t be too upset either. For Southeast Asia, Abe was a promoter of regional multilateralism.
Rome () – Along with other world leaders, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered his condolences for the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In Beijing, however, the demise of a statesman already perceived as an adversary, if not an enemy, is more likely to be celebrated.
A nationalist who wanted to change Japan’s pacifist constitution, a legacy of World War II, Abe tried to improve relations with China, but his foreign policy was largely a challenge to the geopolitical rise of the Chinese dragon.
The Taiwanese government knows this well, and it is in Taipei that the sorrow over the death of the Japanese politician is strongest. After his resignation as prime minister in 2020, Abe’s opposition to China’s ambitions over Taiwan had intensified. Abe called for an increase in the national defense budget of 2% of GDP, among other things to deter China from using force against Taiwan.
The former Tokyo prime minister believed that the US should review its “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taipei and make clear its commitment to defending the island. Abe recently recalled that a possible Chinese attack on the US during a crisis in the Taiwan Strait could pose an “existential threat” to Japan. If so, Tokyo should exercise its right to “collective self-defense” – adopted by his government in 2015 – and intervene as an ally of Washington.
They also remember well in Beijing that Abe was in favor of reactivating the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), a discussion forum between the United States, Japan, Australia and India that the Chinese leadership considers the embryo of an Asian NATO. Thanks to the Quad, Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have further cemented anti-Chinese relations between their countries.
All this without forgetting the tirade about the sovereignty of the Senkaku / Diaoyu in the East China Sea, islands administered by Japan, but which China claims as its own. In fact, the potential trigger for a future military confrontation between the two countries.
Despite Vladimir Putin’s publicly expressed dismay, those in the Kremlin must feel they have gained something from Abe’s disappearance. The late Japanese leader was a hardliner against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and used the issue to promote Japan’s military buildup. It should be remembered that Moscow and Tokyo have never reached an agreement on the Kuril Islands, which Russia administers, but which Japan claims in part.
In the countries of Southeast Asia, the feeling is probably of the opposite sign: that of having lost a reference point. Abe has promoted multilateral efforts to bring Asia Pacific economies closer together. He reactivated -successfully- the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promoted by former US President Barack Obama, the free trade agreement that was going to counteract the Chinese advance, later abandoned by Trump. Since 2018, a version of the pact without Washington’s accession has been in force, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (Cptpp), of which Japan, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand are part. . Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
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