Summary:
This paper discusses the strategic reset implemented by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his second tenure as a Prime Minister. Abe’s success in re-engineering Japan’s international profile and influence was the result of three core initiatives: he centralised the Japanese decision-making system around the Prime Minister’s office (Kantei); he expanded the realm of the ‘politically possible’ in foreign and security affairs; and he injected Japanese foreign and security policy with a worldview focused on the Indo-Pacific region. In particular, the paper explores how the importance of Abe’s centralisation of power cannot be disentangled from the fundamental ideational and behavioural changes implied in the second and third initiatives. Abe took power to the Prime Minister’s office and used it to shake the bureaucracy out of established patterns of behaviour and offered a vision which made new policy—a reset—possible.
