page_title: Shinzo Abe
section_title: Foreign policy
hierarchical_section_title: Shinzo Abe / Third term as prime minister (2014–2017) / Foreign policy
caption_attribution_description: Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and President Donald Trump shaking hands on February 10, 2017.
context_page_description: Shinzo Abe is a Japanese politician who has served four terms as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party since 2012, and previously from 2006 to 2007. He also served as Chief Cabinet Secretary from 2005 to 2006 and was Leader of the Opposition in 2012. He is the longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.
  Abe was elected to the House of Representatives in the 1993 election. He was appointed Chief Cabinet Secretary by Junichiro Koizumi in September 2005, before going on to replace Koizumi as LDP President in September 2006. He was subsequently confirmed as Prime Minister of Japan by a special session of the National Diet, becoming, aged 52, Japan's youngest post-war Prime Minister, and the first to have been born after World War II. Abe resigned as Prime Minister after one year in office, citing ulcerative colitis, shortly after his party lost that year's House of Councillors election. He was replaced by Yasuo Fukuda, the first in a series of five prime ministers who each failed to retain office for more than sixteen months.
context_section_description: On a tour of the Middle East in January 2015, Abe announced that Japan would provide 200 million dollars in non-military assistance to countries fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as part of a 2.5 billion-dollar aid package. Shortly after this, ISIL released a video in which a masked figure (identified as Mohammed Emwazi or "Jihadi John") threatened to kill two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, in retaliation for the move unless Abe's government paid 200 million dollars of ransom money. Abe cut short his trip to deal with the crisis, declared that such acts of terrorism were "unforgivable" and promised to save the hostages while refusing to pay the ransom. The Abe cabinet worked with the Jordanian government to attempt to secure the release of both hostages, after further videos were released by ISIL linking their fate to that of the pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh, with deputy foreign minister Yasuhide Nakayama conducting negotiations in Amman. Both hostages were killed, ISIL releasing news of Yukawa's death on 24 January and Goto's on 31 January. Abe condemned the killings as a "heinous act", declared that Japan would "not give in to terrorism" and pledged to work with the international community to bring the killers to justice. There was some criticism of Abe for his move to pledge aid against ISIL while they were holding Japanese citizens hostage, but polls showed support for his administration increasing in the aftermath of the crisis. He later used the example of the hostage crisis to argue the case for the collective self-defense legislation that his government introduced in the summer of 2015 (see below).
  In April 2015, he addressed a joint sitting of the U.S. Congress, the first Japanese prime minister to do so. In his speech he referred to the Japan-US Alliance as the "Alliance of Hope", promised that Japan would play a more active security and defense role in the alliance and argued that the TPP would bring both economic and security benefits to the Asia-Pacific region. The address served as part of a state visit to the United States, the eighth of the Obama Presidency, which the president referred to as a "celebration of the ties of friendship" between America and Japan. During the visit, Abe attended a state dinner at the White House.
  Like his predecessors Tomiichi Murayama and Junichiro Koizumi, Abe issued a statement commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the World War II on 14 August 2015. This statement had been widely anticipated, with some commentators expecting Abe to amend or even refuse to repeat the previous leaders' apologies for Japan's role in the war. In the statement, Abe committed to upholding the previous apologies and expressed "profound grief and eternal, sincere condolences" for the "immeasurable damage and suffering" Japan had caused for "innocent people" during the conflict. He also argued that Japan should not be "predestined to apologize" forever, noting that more than eighty percent of Japanese people alive today were born after the conflict and played no part in it. The governments of both China and South Korea responded with criticism of the statement, but analysts noted that it was muted and restrained in tone, in comparison to the harsher rhetoric that has been used previously. A representative of the US National Security Council welcomed the statement, and referred to Japan as having been a "model for nations everywhere" in its record on "peace, democracy, and the rule of law" since the war's end. Professor Gerald Curtis of Columbia University argued that the statement "probably satisfies no constituency" either in Japan or abroad, but that by repeating the words "aggression", "colonialism", "apology" and "remorse" used in the Murayama Statement of 1995, it was likely to be enough to improve relations with China and Korea.
  In December 2015, Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed deals in which India agreed to buy Shinkansen technology from Japan (financed in part by a loan from the Japanese government), and for Japan to be rais
caption: Abe and U.S. President Donald Trump in February 2017
exif: {}