65 - How the East Asia Summit Can Achieve its Potential

Summary

The Cold War provided a stable and simple bipolar global structure within which East Asian states organized their security and foreign policies. The end of the Cold War removed this adversarial but stable global order while the shift of global economic and strategic power now means that how East Asian states organize their strategic affairs will increasingly shape global security.

Destabilisers

1. • As anticipated by theorists, the speed and scope of the power transition centred on East Asia is transforming relations between the rising major powers, China and India, and the previously more powerful ones, the United States and Japan. India's growing capacity, its ambition and increasing interest in East Asia have deepened and diversified India's strategic relations with the United States and Japan. The opposite is largely true when it comes to China's strategic relations with the United States and Japan.

2. The US has been the region's pre-eminent power for decades, and has a wide range of alliance and security partners who depend on it for their security. The US-China strategic relationship is the most important facet of the power transition process. High-level voices in Beijing regularly describe the US alliance system in the region as a Cold War anachronism. Washington in turn is rebalancing its strategic policy toward Asia with a focus on strengthening and expanding this network. This is indicative of the increasingly competitive basis of current US-China strategic relations and their regional ramifications.

3. • East Asia's long-standing territorial dis-putes are flaring up and becoming a more central part of bilateral and regional relations in the region. This is a symptom of an increasingly competitive region and is fuelling a sense of regional insecurity.

4. China is the focus of much of the concern. The China-Japan dispute is the most threatening. Both are major powers with advanced war fighting capabilities and Japan's administration of the disputed islands draws the US into the strategic calculus because of the US-Japan security treaty.

Stabilisers

1. • Non-military threats are a growing focus of regional states’ strategic and defence policy and of defence force deployment nationally and regionally. These non-traditional security issues range are diverse and range across many ministerial portfolios, and tend to require inter-state cooperation to be addressed.