On July 8, 2022, CIS Director Richard Samuels was quoted by David E Sanger from The New York Times on Shinzo Abe's influence in Japan. 

Quote: "We didn't know what we were going to get when Abe came to office with this hard nationalist reputation," said Richard Samuels, the director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and the author of books on Japan's military and intelligence capabilities. "What we got was  pragmatic realist who understoof the limits of Japan's power, and who knew it wasn't going to be able to balance China's rise on its own. So he designed a new system."