During the first administration of Donald J. Trump, if any world leader could claim to have had the now president-elect’s number, it was Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister at the time.
Mr. Abe, who was assassinated by a gunman in 2022, was considered a Trump whisperer par excellence, tapping into the president’s love of golf, hamburgers and adulation in a way that helped shelter Japan from Mr. Trump’s punishing instincts.
Mr. Abe was the first foreign leader to visit Mr. Trump after he was elected in 2016, bringing a gift of golf clubs to Trump Tower in Manhattan. After the president’s inauguration, Mr. Abe quickly assumed the role of elder statesman guiding the new man on the world stage. On multiple phone calls, he was a reliable friendly ear. The first time Mr. Abe visited the new president at his plush resort residence, Mar-a-Lago, just weeks after Mr. Trump took office, the pair played golf together and dined with their wives.
When Mr. Trump came to Japan on a state visit, Mr. Abe piled on the pomp and circumstance, naming a trophy after the president to award at a sumo wrestling tournament and granting the American president the honor of being the first international leader to meet the newly enthroned emperor.
Mr. Abe “moved quickly enough, he got the tone right, he knew how to talk to” President Trump, said Tobias Harris, founder and principal of Japan Foresight, a risk consultancy in Washington. “It’s hard to think of a leader who did quite as well.”
Now, as Japan and the rest of the world brace for the next Trump administration, the question of how to manage the most mercurial of American presidents has officials frantically reviewing their playbooks from those first four years.
Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister, picked up the phone Thursday morning in Tokyo to call the president-elect, congratulating him on his “campaign to make America great again” and for “receiving approval from many people.” Mr. Ishiba told reporters that he planned to meet with Mr. Trump as soon as possible.
Mr. Abe’s strategy offers potential guidance on forestalling some of the most aggressive impulses of Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda. When running for president the first time, Mr. Trump warned that he would impose border taxes on Japanese automakers and assailed Japan for not paying enough for its own defense.
In part because Mr. Abe shared some political values with Mr. Trump — they were both defense hawks and nationalists — and because Mr. Abe knew how to flatter the American president, the Japanese prime minister was able to beat back most of Mr. Trump’s initial threats. Mr. Abe “avoided unnecessary conflicts between the Trump administration and the Japanese government,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Hosei University in Tokyo.
When Mr. Trump first took office, Mr. Abe had the advantage of having been prime minister for nearly five years already, and Mr. Trump deferred to his more experienced counterpart. When North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile during one of their dinners at Mar-a-Lago in February 2017, Mr. Trump ceded to Mr. Abe during a news conference that followed. Afterward, the president said that he wanted “everybody to understand and fully know that the United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent.”
As time wore on, observers questioned whether Japan was getting as much as it should from Mr. Abe’s efforts. He had even endured the ignominy of tumbling into a golf bunker while hitting the links with Mr. Trump near Tokyo, yet Mr. Trump left Japan off a list of countries temporarily exempted from tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and failed to keep Mr. Abe in the loop when the U.S. leader decided to accept an invitation to meet Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, for nuclear negotiations.
“The returns were diminishing,” Mr. Harris said.
In the time since Mr. Trump left office in 2020, Japan has taken considerable steps to bolster its defense position. That had been a point of tension with Japan in his first term, when Mr. Trump accused Japan, where about 50,000 U.S. troops are based, of being a free rider on the United States military.
Japan has committed to raising its defense budget to more than 2 percent of its gross domestic product and has rapidly purchased Tomahawk missiles and other missile defense systems from American defense companies.
Because of these actions, said Ichiro Fujisaki, a former Japanese ambassador to Washington, Tokyo is now in a position to tell Mr. Trump “we’ve been doing all that, which he didn’t even have with Abe.”
Yet after a recent general election in which the governing party lost its majority, the government may be in a less stable position to deliver on its defense-spending commitments or to haggle with Mr. Trump over steel tariffs, which President Biden partly lifted in 2022.
Mr. Ishiba, elected just weeks ago, is fighting for his domestic survival and is considered less talented at smoothing ruffled political feathers. Given Mr. Trump’s appetite for entertainment, a “bro” style of communication and open admiration, it is not clear if Mr. Ishiba can manage a second Trump administration as well as Mr. Abe did.
“Ishiba is a serious person who speaks like a university professor,” said Narushige Michishita, a professor of international relations at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “Ishiba can golf, but I doubt that he can build a similar personal relationship with Trump.”
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