 |
| South Korean president Park Geun-hye and Japanese premier Shinzo Abe join U.S. President Barack Obama at a 2014 trilateral meeting. |
By Van Jackson
Seoul’s new multilateral initiative ought to be welcomed in spite of its limits.
Northeast Asia has a regional cooperation deficit, and a new South Korea-proposed institutional process seeks to address it. Although welcome in principle, it holds little prospect for transforming Northeast Asian security dynamics. It will inevitably generate opportunities for China to try to undermine the regional liberal order and the U.S. alliance network. It may even negatively impact efforts to denuclearize North Korea.
And yet, for all its flaws, Northeast Asia’s newest institutional process has a chance to achieve something that may be impossible without it: preventing competition in geopolitics from permanently overriding cooperation in non-competitive domains.
Geopolitics in Northeast Asia is a high-stakes game whose basic logic is well understood by its players. Whether the Korean DMZ, the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, the Taiwan Strait, Chinese claims of influence over the Yellow Sea, or the Japan-held Senkakus, all of today’s Northeast Asian flashpoints have existed largely unchanged for decades.
The region’s frozen conflicts create acute competitive security dynamics that tend to dominate all else. In such an environment, the risk of conflict is high, and all players have strong incentives to demonstrate strength and resolve. Northeast Asia more closely resembles a realist security environment—in the classical, structural, and neoclassical sense—than perhaps any other sub-region in the world.
Read the full story at The Diplomat