Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigned Wednesday after a year of scandal and missteps. The abrupt announcement, coming just days after Abe pledged to fight for renewal of a law allowing Japanese naval ships to aid coalition forces in Afghanistan, reminds one of an exchange from the movie “Fletch,” where Chevy Chase notes that a third party had died suddenly. “Sudden?” replies a doctor. “He had been dying for years.” “Yeah,” responds Chase, “but I mean the very end, when he actually died. That was extremely sudden.”

The melodrama of Abe’s final months was largely misinterpreted by many at home and abroad. Commentators believed Abe was simply stubborn, refusing to take responsibility for the crushing defeat his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) received at the polls in July. That election, for seats in the upper house of the Japanese Diet (parliament), was seen as a barometer of Abe’s unpopularity. Abe himself is a member of the lower house, which selects the prime minister, so neither his job nor his position was directly at stake. 

What made Abe resign? The proximate cause was plummeting public support. Abe made disastrous personnel choices for certain cabinet positions, notably agriculture minister.

In the Japanese system, however, it is traditional that party leaders take responsibility for significant electoral defeats by resigning, as the late Ryutaro Hashimoto did in 1998. Yet Abe refused to resign, apparently believing that the government’s agenda should be pursued independent of any upper-house ballot and that the duration of a premiership should be decided solely by elections to the lower house.

Abe’s position reflected the development of the two-party system in Japan and the subsequent electoral struggle between the LDP and the major opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). These trends had the potential to bring greater stability to Japanese domestic politics, moving it away from the Italian model of short-term premierships and closer to the British model, wherein prime ministers usually resign their party posts only when their parties lose a governing majority. Abe’s resignation throws all that into doubt.

Power Politics on Display

So what made Abe resign? The proximate cause was plummeting public support. Abe made disastrous personnel choices for certain cabinet positions, notably agriculture minister. Allegations of graft and misuse of funds led one of his ministers to commit suicide earlier this year. Overall, five of Abe’s cabinet appointees resigned. On top of that, Abe never successfully resolved the on-going pension scandal, in which over 50 million pension records were lost. But perhaps most damningly, even after he refused to resign last month and formed a new cabinet, Abe brought on replacement ministers who had to resign within days due to fresh corruption allegations. He had squandered his final chance.

Abe was pushed toward his decision by the unbending tactics of Ichiro Ozawa, head of the opposition DPJ. Ozawa left the LDP in 1993 after alienating many of the older party bosses who objected to his aggressive ways. It was Ozawa’s desire for power that spurred the beginnings of the two-party system in Japan, as various splinter groups and disaffected LDP politicians began coalescing around him. Yet Ozawa was never able to form an outright majority and, until recently, had been seen as a spent force in Japanese politics.

Back in the 1990s, Ozawa championed a more assertive Japanese foreign policy: one not as subservient to the United States, and yet one that gave Japan a global role commensurate with its economic power. But since the July upper house poll, he has refused to consider an extension of the anti-terrorism law that allowed Japanese maritime forces to provide thousands of gallons of fuel to coalition ships operating near Afghanistan. This was a puzzling move, since the election had focused on domestic issues. Abe, however, had declared his intent to get the renewal passed; otherwise Tokyo would have to withdraw its ships from the Indian Ocean starting on November 1st.

Some U.S. government officials are furious with Ozawa for playing politics with the anti-terrorism law. But they are equally furious with Abe for his helplessness.

As Ozawa revealed his intransigence, the government stepped back, eventually floating an idea to scrap the current law and pass a measure focused more on offering humanitarian aid to the Afghans. Abe then tried to rally by suggesting he would seek a lower house override of the upper house’s refusal to extend the mission. Ozawa pounced on this, and rumors that the upper house would censure Abe began spreading around Tokyo. In a last ditch effort, Abe indicated he wanted to meet with Ozawa to hammer out a compromise, but Ozawa refused. Facing no options, Abe made a snap decision to resign.

What does it mean for U.S.-Japan relations?

Such "inside baseball” politics may be of little interest to American observers, who are more concerned with what effect this will have on U.S.-Japan cooperation. Such concerns are warranted, though perhaps not for the reasons Americans think.

Privately, some U.S. government officials are furious with Ozawa for playing politics with the anti-terrorism law. But they are equally furious with Abe for his helplessness. The Japanese have supplied millions of dollars worth of high-grade fuel, which the U.S. cannot deliver, to Pakistani and British ships. The fear is that Pakistan will withdraw its ships if the Japanese leave, thereby eliminating the one Muslim nation in the Afghan coalition.

For this reason, Japan’s role appears crucial to U.S. policymakers. But they are much less focused on its impact in Japan. Clear majorities of the Japanese public don’t support the refueling mission, in part because Abe did a poor job selling it. More importantly, Ozawa and others have made the case that Japan’s subservience to America is both unconstitutional and dangerous—that it will drag Japan into faraway conflicts of little immediate consequence to Japanese national interests. Abe’s plan to revise Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which currently prevents Japan from engaging in collective self-defense, lies in tatters, and Tokyo may be less inclined to join overseas operations in the near future.

This is the result of the globalization of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Washington’s desire for a reliable, go-to partner may have made strategic and even tactical sense, but it appears that Koizumi and Abe’s willingness to fill that role put them far ahead of their fellow citizens. Neither Koizumi nor Abe made a particularly compelling case for why it was in Japan’s best interests to dramatically expand its international activities, especially when those activities required military forces. Some folks in Washington and Tokyo even allege that Japan joined the war on terrorism solely as a down payment for U.S. support against North Korea’s nuclear programs.

Ozawa is now insisting that Japan only join UN-run operations, and that it put less emphasis on the U.S. alliance. This is a risky ploy, both diplomatically and electorally. Washington is unlikely to significantly alter alliance promises, but a more independent approach on Tokyo’s part may, if maintained long enough, slowly drive the two partners apart, as was the case with America and France during the Cold War. If Japanese voters get a chance to see what such isolation is like, they may well punish Ozawa for doing unnecessary damage to Japan’s most important alliance. In either case, it will have an impact on Washington’s dealings with the rest of Asia, where some believe the U.S. is moving closer to China.

Japan is now at a crossroads. Abe’s likely successor, Foreign Minister Taro Aso, does not have deep political support among the populace, and is suspected by Japan’s neighbors of being a hardliner. Aso—or whoever becomes premier—faces serious challenges. Will economic reform continue? Will Japan’s bold, yet so far largely rhetorical, new diplomacy survive? Is this the beginning of a true two-party system in Japan? Will Washington give its Asian ally the space to sort out these developments? There’s a lot more riding on it than free gasoline.

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image credit: Everett Kennedy Brown/epa/Corbis.