In Washington DC in February 2013, Abe announced ‘Japan is back!’ This was followed by statements on ‘proactive pacifism’, and solidarity with partners — particularly Australia and Britain — embodied by a National Security Strategy, National Security Council and legal reforms during the 2015 ‘summer of protests’. But Abe seems more content with displays of symbolic solidarity — such as unnecessarily escorting a US supply vessel in Spring 2017 — rather than exposing his troops and government to risk.

Abe is the man the right wing want to love and the left wing want to hate. He promotes constitutional revision of belligerency-renouncing Article Nine. He venerates Japanese war dead and empathises with war criminals. And his revisionist historical views broadly infuriate, while playing to the nationalist gallery. Ideally, he desires a historical legacy matching his grandfather, former prime minister Kishi Nobusuke. And while Abe’s security-focused legal reforms are not as important as the 1960 US–Japan security treaty, they provoked unusually intense and broad-ranging opposition.

The problem for the two extreme wings of the Japanese political spectrum is that Abe has lived up to the expectations of neither. He has generally avoided damaging ‘historical’ statements, and has impressed with his diligence, deft footwork and statesman-like demeanour. Economic revitalisation has been the defined target, while defence spending has only modestly increased. He attempted to solve the ‘comfort women’ controversy with South Korea, began rebuilding relations with China, and has crossed the globe to forge partnerships. Not since former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has Japan had such a well-recognised leader.

The contrast of mentor Koizumi to the prodigy Abe is instructive. In the face of great domestic opposition in 2004, Koizumi dispatched the SDF to Iraq as he appreciated their strategic value for US alliance politics. Koizumi risked casualties and electorate displeasure to tangibly demonstrate solidarity with Japan’s vital ally, while simultaneously courting nationalists and angering China.

When the post-Koizumi Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) relinquished power, its successor the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) expanded UNPKO deployments, initiating the UNMISS dispatch. This occurred despite SDF opposition, based upon the failure to address operational-legal issues of rules of engagement, collective security and withdrawal policies.

Japan’s UNPKO agenda was established by the LDP in 1992 for the dispatch of the SDF to the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia. The agenda sought to raise Japan’s profile, originally for permanent status on the UN Security Council; demonstrate burden-sharing partnership in light of post-Gulf War criticism; and contribute to international security and law.

China has invested heavily in South Sudan, so UNMISS additionally served strategic interests. Officials confidentially referenced an ideal 10 to 1 ratio of Chinese to Japanese peacekeepers, reflecting respective populations, and the need to prevent UNPKO being transmuted into Chinese oilfield protection operations.

Abe appears to have abandoned this strategy. Three UNPKO withdrawals between 2012 and 2017 were remarkable, even for risk-averse Japan.

While the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti — which the DPJ terminated — was a logistically challenging engineering mission, far removed from core Japanese interests, the termination of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in the Golan — due to (slightly) elevated risks from the Syrian civil war — was damaging. The Japanese UNDOF contingent was highly valued as a small, secure, capability-enhancing and integrated unit, and therefore was sorely missed on its departure. UNDOF had also become the de facto SDF ‘UNPKO academy’.

The Japanese government stated the UNMISS withdrawal was not security-based like UNDOF. But revelations by the ‘morning reports’ that the SDF had witnessed intense combat in July 2016 — which could have triggered their withdrawal under dispatch legislation — belied that claim. The cover-up and subsequent ministerial denials transformed UNMISS from a ‘past-military’ to a ‘prescient-political’ problem — an existential threat to government credibility. With indecent haste, withdrawal was announced.

How can these withdrawals be reconciled with Abe’s ‘pro-active’ rhetoric, strategic shift and 2014 re-commitment to UNPKO? What purposes had the controversial 2014 collective-security constitutional reinterpretation, 2015 revisions and 2016 Kaketsuke Keigo (rush and rescue) measures served? Clearly Japan is broadcasting distinctly dissonant messages, which has confused and frustrated even Abe’s allies.

With such efforts made and risks taken to sensibly enhance SDF overseas operational capabilities, why was peacekeeping terminated so abruptly? Perhaps the government judged the Trump administration’s regard for multilateral efforts was so limited that peacekeeping deployments had become ‘redundant’ within alliance management.

But UNPKO provided the SDF’s only continual operational duties, and unique opportunities for functional engagement with partners. Withdrawal does not enhance domestic security against perceived North Korean or Chinese threats, but rather makes Abe’s generally sound security reforms appear hollow.

Japanese NGO’s have meanwhile decided that they wish to continue the South Sudan infrastructure development that the SDF abandoned. It may be that the next generation of Japan’s ‘pro-active pacifism’ actors will be civilians, while the SDF remain at home.

Garren Mulloy is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Relations, Daito Bunka University, Japan. He is also the author of the forthcoming book Defenders of Japan — The Post-Imperial Armed Forces, 1946-2016: A History.