With Friends Like George.(The World According to Alan Greenspan)(World Affairs)(Japanese ties with the United States; George W. Bush)

Byline: Christian Caryl; With Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo and Adam B. Kushner in New York

Japan's Shinzo Abe has become the latest global leader to be felled by his ties to the U.S.

He started his term in office offering a fresh new start -- a forceful young nationalist and the first Japanese prime minister to be born after the second world war. It all ended last week with Shinzo Abe looking very much like a broken man, his eyes welling with tears as he gave his farewell speech before checking into a hospital for "exhaustion." Though dogged by a string of cabinet scandals and political missteps, the issue that brought him down in the end was his support for America in the new world war, the one on terror.

Ironic, given that Abe had built his political reputation, and early popularity, on hawkish and pro-American policies. Now he has joined the ranks of colleagues including Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and Britain's Tony Blair, who found themselves pushed out of power when their support for America's wars lost traction with their own countrymen. Others, from Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf to Australia's John Howard, face rising popular discontent over their ties to George W. Bush, but still hold their jobs. Abe was the first to fall in Asia for his friendship with Bush.

Not that the Japanese are suddenly turning against their old ally. They remain very pro-American, polls show. But they are revolting, in the European way, against Bush's priorities -- the War on Terror and its battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are distancing themselves from playing a military role.

In polls the Japanese routinely express approval of their half-century-old alliance with the United States, despite lingering irritation over the stationing of American forces on Japanese territory and the vast sums Tokyo pays to keep them there. But in recent months, ordinary Japanese have grown weary of Abe's ambition to restore Japanese stature by, for example, easing restrictions in the pacifist postwar Constitution on sending Japanese troops abroad. Washington, eager for more Japanese support in places like Iraq, fully supported the constitutional revision. But Japanese voters wanted Abe to focus on problems at home: endangered pensions, widening social inequality and shaky health care.

By the end, Abe had simply drifted too close to the Bush worldview, in which the War on Terror is priority No. 1. Following a meeting with Bush during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Sydney, Abe vowed in public to stake his office on a controversial law enabling Japanese forces to provide logistical support to America and its allies in the war in Afghanistan. Three days later, he was blaming his surprise decision to resign on the intransigence of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which refused to back him up. But it was Abe who left sounding intransigent as he insisted that "Japan must continue its fight against terrorism under a new prime minister."