On July 20, 2022, the United States Senate adopted a unanimous resolution honoring the achievements of the late Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan who was assassinated on July 8 at a political rally. The wording of the resolution praised Abe for his efforts in strengthening the US-Japan Alliance, as well as expanding the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP)” strategy. It likewise extolled him for “leadership that laid a lasting foundation for the United States and Japan to partner for decades in promoting freedom, prosperity, and security around the world, and opposing authoritarianism and tyranny.”
Compared to past administrations of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), his government earned notably high marks in America. The reason for this lies in the role Abe played in engineering the transition away from the national policy known as the “Yoshida Doctrine,” a liberal route for Japan’s national strategy distinguished by economic growth and light armament maintained in the past, to the pragmatically rooted “Proactive Contribution to Peace” for the purpose of realizing the FOIP. The Yoshida Doctrine, essentially maintained by all Japanese administrations previous to Abe, was a strategy adopted by Japan under Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida (the prime minister from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954) following the nation’s defeat in 1945. It focused upon reconstructing Japan’s domestic economy while relying heavily on the security alliance with the United States. The basic policy was to contain investment in military strength to the minimum necessary level, while expanding the national budget for economic growth and social security in moving to stabilize the administration. The Yoshida Doctrine was a national strategy, which succeeded in paving the way to Japan’s high economic growth from the 1960s, while instilling a particularly stable political foundation for the LDP even among the ranks of democratic countries around the world.
However, LDP administrations prior to the Abe era chose to adopt only a moderate approach to the overseas dispatch of Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and bolstering of Japan’s own military strength for the purpose of upholding the functions of the US-Japan Alliance and United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. The reason for that route lies in the fact that during the Cold War, an agreement was reached with the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) and other left-wing political parties to not recognize the exercising of the right of collective self-defense as stated in the Japanese constitution. This stance can be said to exist in stark contrast to European allies, which participated in the multilateral alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) upon the foundation of exercising the right of collective self-defense.
Read the whole chapter here.
The views, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this report are solely those of its author(s) and do not reflect the view of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, or its employees.