Potolicchio: Ian, you put your big GZERO summit strategically in Tokyo, for a reason. What does the Global South think about Japan and what its role should be? Bremmer: Well, I think that the Global South welcomes Japan's focus on them. Japan is, in a sense, the least controversial of the major powers out there, in terms of the historic level of humanitarian aid, the high quality of the investments in the managerial support, in the lack of corruption that attends them and also the soft power, and the general level of positive cultural affinity that countries around the world connect when you ask them about Japan. So it's not controversial when the Japanese are coming in, it's just too frequently their footprint is light. There just aren't a lot of Japanese in Africa, so you don't encounter them very much. You do in Peru, but like in Turkey and Britain, it's hard. I would say that this is an area where Kishida has done a lot.

The first time I sat down with Kishida, the first 20 minutes, he wanted to talk to me about the Global South and how Japan could do more. So that was pretty interesting. He's made that the key element of his foreign policy, he has invited lots of Global South leaders, including Lula, Modi, and Jokowi, also leaders from the Comoros, who chair The African Union right now, The Cook Islands, Chair of The Pacific Islands Forum, to the G7 Summit that they just hosted in Hiroshima. After decades of work, Japan has cultivated excellent relations in Southeast Asia too, where they're viewed very favorably. Even though Japan is not the country that the Americans are spending the most time talking about, when you talk about the Global South, the fact is, that they have a pretty strong base. They're well respected, they're well aligned. I think that the Japanese are also very sensitive to the concerns of Global South nations in a way that the Americans frequently aren't.

No one in Japan is trying to get members of the Global South to choose between The US and China. Kishida wants to position Japan as the bridge between the G7 and the Global South. Japan is uniquely kind of a country that has some credibility in the global south to pull it off, in part because Japan is the only Asian member of the G7. It's like a Western club and Japan's kind of like hanging out there. They are playing a bigger role in geopolitics generally right now and that's something that Global South members, when they think about, are pretty happy with. But I would also say that China's always looming large in Japan's mind, and Kishida's attention on the Global South is not just because he's a good guy, but also because the Japanese are interested in countering China's influence.