Abduction versus alliance: Japan’s foreign policy, now proactive?

This article examines the validity of characterising contemporary Japanese foreign policy as ‘proactive’ by analysing Tokyo’s recalibration towards North Korea following the 2018 US – North Korea Singapore Summit. While recent scholarship often highlights Japan’s increased diplomatic activism and institutional centralisation under Shinzo Abe as evidence of foreign policy ‘proactivity’, this study argues that Japan’s foreign policy remains fundamentally constrained by its security dependence on the United States. By process-tracing Japan’s abrupt abandonment of its long-standing ‘abduction-first’ precondition in response to Washington’s diplomatic pivot, the article demonstrates how visible activism can be driven by a structural need to preserve alliance cohesion and avoid marginalisation. The findings suggest that the proactive – reactive dichotomy is an epistemological barrier that obscures the alliance-embedded character of Japan’s strategic agency. The study contends that Japan’s regional initiatives remain pre-committed to a ‘rules-based order’ whose credibility is tied to US regional primacy.