Two political assassinations happened within the span of one day. One was figurative, the other real. Boris Johnson suffered from a very British conservative curse, of being stabbed in the back by others from his own party. Shinzo Abe was shot. History will remember both of them as being transformative. Boris changed the direction of Britain, and accelerated the change of direction in the Euro-Atlantic. Abe was instrumental in changing the Indo-Pacific in the way it will be remembered for years to come in the future.

It is important to remember that he wasn’t liked much, especially by the American liberal administrations. The Obama administration despised him for being a nationalist and considered him to be too hawkish about China. In a scathing assessment in the London Review of Books, Edward Luttwak wrote,

It is a tribute to the power of dogma that for most of Abe’s premiership, even before the arrival of Obama’s ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, the US embassy has remained a source of misinformation, misdirection and misunderstanding about both Abe himself and his government. Fixated on his undoubtedly right-wing political affiliations, and nostalgic for the old Japan, which happily professed its pacifism and was so gratifyingly deferential to them individually, too many US diplomats contrived to miss the often very progressive substance of Abe’s actual policies, and their advantages from the US point of view.

The liberal hatred for Abe carries to this day. On the eve of his death, critical reviews about his “complicated legacy” were found in the pages of The Economist, The Nation, New Yorker, New York Times, and NPR. The line of this critical narrative under the euphemism of “examining the complicated legacy,” is very simple. Abe was a visionary and was ahead of his time in understanding the rise of China and the resetting of the global order. But he was also a “nationalist,” a dreaded word for the transnational progressive elite. That added to his conservatism, it makes him an object of disdain. Which explains the bizarre proposals in the pages of The Economist, on how Japan should “follow Mr Abe’s pragmatism, not his nationalism,” without a second of thought about what happens when pragmatism logically dictates nationalism.

Nevertheless, his foresight continues to be appreciated by others. Perhaps the most effusive of praises were by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, another equally hated figure among the progressives. Modi, who was also sanctioned under the Obama administration during his tenure as a chief minister of an Indian state, wrote on the Ministry of External Affairs blog, republished in the Japan Times, on how Abe was a pioneering figure to have understood how lopsided the Asian balance was to be, with the rise of China, and by doing that laid the foundations of a restructured order in Asia. As Modi wrote,

Among his greatest gifts to us and his most enduring legacy, and one for which the world will always be indebted, is his foresight in recognizing the changing tides and gathering storm of our time and his leadership in responding to it. Long before others, he, in his seminal speech to the Indian parliament in 2007, laid the ground for the emergence of the Indo Pacific region as a contemporary political, strategic and economic reality — a region that will also shape the world in this century.

Luttwak concurs:

To change long-settled habits of passivity, Abe established a National Security Council that is not just a gathering place for representatives of the foreign, defence and intelligence bureaucracies, as in most other countries, but an actual policy-making body operated by its own staff, the National Security Secretariat. It has been remarkably effective from the start, formulating Japan’s first post-1945 national security strategy and leading successful negotiations with the Chinese.

Abe’s signature move was to incrementally move Japan to ditch its ingrained pacifism, but the time for incremental change has passed with the war in Ukraine and the naval buildup of China. A conflict in the South China Sea or the Himalayas will be a shock closer to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Quad between India, Japan, Australia, and the United States is not a military alliance, despite what Abe wanted, and the biggest problem in that is India, the only country to share a natural land border with China, and consequently the only country reticent enough to join any military alliance that might chain-gang into a great power war. It might not be prudent. After all, India had a formal mutual defense treaty once earlier, with the USSR in 1971, and also a mutual defense treaty might prompt further interoperability with Australia and the United States, as well as propel its primitive defense research sector. Abe’s own countrymen (and Japanese conservatives) are still reticent about changing the pacifist constitution, or funding more than around 1 percent for defense. It is true that Abe’s enduring legacy will always be his foresight about China. The Quad, the Indo Pacific Oceans Initiative, the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, are all Abe’s initiatives. He was perhaps Asia’s last true statesman. However, the idea that he permanently restructured the Asian order is premature.

Sumantra Maitra is a national security fellow at the Center for the National Interest and an elected Associate Fellow at the Royal Historical Society.

Image: Reuters.