By Van Jackson
The region’s lack of transparency increases the risk of conflict everywhere.
Asia has an opacity problem that increases the risk of conflict virtually everywhere. Whatever U.S. military and diplomatic solutions are brought to bear in the region as part of the ongoing policy of rebalancing to Asia, they should be guided by a simple heuristic: reduce, or at least don’t exacerbate, the opacity of a dimly lit environment.
It’s well understood that trust among Asian states is historically absent, while outstanding disputes among them are ever present. At the same time, military modernization is a recurring theme in even the poorest Asian governments, and in many cases military spending is on the rise.
For Asian states, the structure of the regional security environment stunts cooperation, exacerbates political misunderstandings, tempts military accidents, and incidentally creates cover for surreptitious forms of coercion by opportunistic or expansionist states. Central to all of these problems is opacity, whether last month’s mini-crisis between North and South Korea, Japanese fighter jets scrambling to protect Senkaku island airspace, or China’s many gray zone challenges to the status quo in the South China Sea.
In every instance of potential conflict, there exist at least two types of opacity.
Read the full story at The Diplomat