New Delhi, April 30 -- It has been almost two decades since the late Shinzo Abe [former prime minister of Japan] stood in India's parliament and told the assembled legislators that "it is incumbent upon us two democracies, Japan and India, to carry out the pursuit of freedom and prosperity in the region."

Abe defined their task as protecting freedom of navigation in what he was perhaps the first to call the Indo-Pacific. That task has gotten only more urgent as America withdraws-or, more recently, imposes blockades on crucial straits-and China pushes harder against the first island chain.

Abe's vision never really became reality, because Japan's efforts with India and others in Asia always had self-imposed limits. There's a chance, howe...