Sanae Takaichi would do well to channel Shinzo Abe and Margaret Thatcher in her U.S. dealings.

While much of the world is focused on President Donald Trump’s planned meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday in South Korea, a summit of similarly major significance is scheduled for Tuesday in Tokyo. Trump will meet with newly elected Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female leader, who comes to power at a decisive moment for U.S.-Japan relations and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

Takaichi has fashioned herself as both the heir to Shinzo Abe’s conservative politics as prime minister and the embodiment of an Asian Margaret Thatcher, unbending in the face of domestic and international challenges. At home, Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party has seen a prolonged drop in public support as Japan — after decades of deflationary challenges — now confronts rising inflation and cost-of-living concerns. Abroad, she faces an increasingly severe regional security outlook in Northeast Asia.

In the Tuesday meeting, Takaichi would do well to channel Abe’s approach to Trump in the U.S. president’s first term and Thatcher’s approach to Ronald Reagan.

Abe was a rare international figure who had the foresight to engage deeply with Trump from the start, while other world leaders were still reeling from the results of the 2016 U.S. election. Across dozens of interactions, Abe was able to imprint on the president the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance and the criticality of U.S. engagement in the dynamic Indo-Pacific region. Abe’s perseverance through the vagaries of Trump’s first term produced invaluable stability as the United States dealt with a rapidly rising China, an emerging India and simmering insecurity in the larger region.

Thatcher, in an earlier age, was likewise an essential international partner for an American president during a deeply consequential geopolitical period. It was Thatcher who bolstered Reagan during periods when many feared the U.S. would falter under Soviet opposition to its efforts to deploy new weapons systems in Europe in the 1980s. Against the advice of key officials in Reagan’s Cabinet, Thatcher insisted on the importance of U.S. backing for Britain after the Falklands invasion. Indeed it was Thatcher who, early on, advised Reagan that Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev was someone he could do business with and should be taken seriously. Her resonant counsel and unwavering support on numerous occasions played a decisive role as deeply consequential foreign policy decisions were taken in the Reagan administration.

The Abe and Thatcher examples offer a useful blueprint for Takaichi as she makes the case to Trump to move beyond the narrow politics of tariffs and consider the larger scale of the geopolitical contest underway in the Indo-Pacific. In light of Trump’s perplexing fascination with the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia and North Korea, her challenge will be to convey to him the dangers they pose, both individually and collectively, to the U.S.-led order. At the core of that nexus is China, which is working at every level — technologically, militarily, politically and strategically — to counter the United States and key allies such as Japan.

This is the moment for the Japanese prime minister to embark on a mission of persuading Trump that it is essential to strengthen the solidarity and deepen the technological and military links between the U.S. and its allies and partners in Asia and Europe. For the good of Japan, yes, but also for the good of democratic nations everywhere, Takaichi will need to show Trump how his “America First” instincts don’t preclude a robust U.S. engagement strategy with the world. In particular, he might be impressed by reminders of the benefits to the U.S. afforded by innovative partnerships such as the Quad (Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.), AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the U.S.) and U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral alignment. None of these mechanisms can succeed without an active American role. And just as Abe tempered some of Trump’s more outlandish expectations for engagements with Xi, Takaichi must leaven Trump’s assumptions about what can be gleaned from dealings with China now.

These are tall orders. Yet in just the first few days of being in office, Takaichi made an impressive start, naming a cabinet that was well received as combining fresh thinking and experience, and vowing to boost defense spending. She is already showing signs of possessing a political savvy, with echoes of Abe and Thatcher, that suggests she is up to the challenge.

Kurt Campbell, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state, is chairman and co-founder of the Asia Group.

Excerpts: The washington post