Re-Envisioning Asia

Francis Fukuyama

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

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Summary:  Washington's system of Asian alliances may have worked during the Cold War, but it ignores today's political reality. Although the six-party talks now underway on North Korea's nukes were born of necessity, their format should be made permanent, so the White House can help reshape Asian diplomacy.

Francis Fukuyama is a Professor of International Political Economy at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

A key task facing the second Bush administration is devising the proper security architecture for eastern Asia. The United States is confronting several immediate problems, including the North Korean nuclear standoff, tension between China and Taiwan, and Islamist terrorism in Southeast Asia. But a forward-looking foreign policy does not simply manage crises; it shapes the context for future policy choices through the creation of international institutions. Eastern Asia has inherited a series of alliances from the early days of the Cold War. These partnerships remain important as a means of providing predictability and deterrence. But a decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is increasingly evident that they do not fit the configuration of politics now taking shape.

The White House has an opportunity to create a visionary institutional framework for the region. In the short term, it can do so by turning the six-party talks on North Korea into a permanent five-power organization that would meet regularly to discuss various security issues in the region, beyond the North Korean nuclear threat. In the long term, Washington will need to consider ways of linking this security dialogue to the various multilateral economic forums now in existence or under consideration, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the ASEAN-plus-three group, which was formed in the wake of the Asian economic crisis and includes China, Japan, and South Korea; and the developing free-trade areas. Asian multilateralism will be critical not just for coordinating the region's booming economies, but also for damping down the nationalist passions lurking beneath the surface of every Asian country.

TIES THAT BIND

Unlike Europe, Asia lacks strong multilateral political institutions. Europe has the EU and NATO, as well as groups such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (osce) and the Council of Europe. Asia's only counterparts are ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum on security matters, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC)--all of which are far weaker organizations. ASEAN does not include China or the other major players in Northeast Asia, and APEC is no more than a consultative body. Asian security is ensured not by multilateral treaties, but by a series of bilateral relationships centering on Washington, in particular the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the U.S.-South Korean relationship.

The reasons for this difference between Europe and Asia lie in history: European countries are linked by similar cultural origins and their shared experience in the twentieth century, to the point that they have been relinquishing important elements of national sovereignty to the EU. By contrast, there is a much higher degree of distrust among the major players in Asia. This suspicion is driven partly by a changing power balance, as Japan is eclipsed by China, but primarily by memories of the Pacific war. After 1945, both Germany and Japan needed to convince their neighbors that they were no longer threats. The new West Germany did so by ceding sovereignty to a series of ...

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