Regional Approaches to Proliferation Prevention -- Northeast Asia Region -- The Stanley Foundation

The Importance of the Northeast Asia Region to Global Security and Stability

Projects of the Northeast Asia Region
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Economic, Social, Political, and Military Divisions in Northeast Asia

A glance at the map and its geopolitical implications suggests why Northeast Asia is among the most important yet dangerous places in the post-Cold War world. The world's heaviest concentration of military and economic capabilities is in this region. The world's three largest nuclear weapons states (United States, Russia, and China), three threshold nuclear weapons states (North Korea, South Korea, and Japan), and the world's three largest economies (on a purchasing power parity basis) constitute Northeast Asia. Following the reunification of both Vietnam and Germany, Northeast Asia now has the world's largest concentration of divided polities-divided China and divided Korea, the two most prominent potential flashpoints. Unlike post-World War II Europe, history has always cast a long shadow on Northeast Asian international relations, often serving as a major source of fodder for national-identity animus. The region also duplicates the global North-South divide with its bifurcation between wealthy capitalist states (Japan, the United States and South Korea) and poor and either socialist or developing countries in transition (North Korea, Mongolia, Russia and China).

The Northeast Asian security equation is further complicated by the fact that it is in this region that a rising China, a declining post-Soviet Russia, a rising South Korea, and a declining North Korea have brought about the greatest swings in power in the last half century. Meanwhile, with every country in the region (except Mongolia) both a consumer and a producer of missiles capable of carrying WMD, the dangerous and unsettling reality is missile proliferation by regional powers with uncertain domestic political futures and ambiguous bilateral relationships toward each other.

Finally, the crisis between Pyongyang and the rest of the world community over North Korean nuclear proliferation threatens to undermine the global nonproliferation regime and could lead to another war on the Korean Peninsula. As one Stanley Foundation-sponsored roundtable concluded in March 2003, "the NPT regime is on the verge of becoming a 'hollow shell' if the North Korea problem is not effectively addressed." The DPRK nuclear crisis is the first true example of a regime member "breaking out" of the treaty and developing weapons. Whereas the Persian Gulf War of 1991 destroyed and froze Iraq's programs prior to their fruition, nothing is currently standing in the way of North Korea joining Israel, India, and Pakistan as a de facto nuclear power. Furthermore, the developments in North Korea were thought to be inherently more serious than that of the South Asian nuclear tests in 1998 because India and Pakistan have always kept themselves wholly outside the boundaries of the regime. North Korea was a standing member of the NPT regime and hence represents the greatest challenge to the Treaty's norms.

The current impasse between the Bush Administration of the United States and the government of Kim Jong-Il could eventually lead to US preemptive conventional military strikes against North Korean nuclear production and storage sites, possibly leading to all-out war on the Peninsula. Bush's characterization of North Korea as a terrorist state within an "Axis of Evil," and the new US strategy of preemptive strikes and preventive war against WMD proliferation threats wherever they may occur, has raised the ideological and security stakes of the standoff on the Peninsula - in effect transforming the longstanding division of the Korean Peninsula into a global rather than regional security issue, and highlighting the economic, military, social, and political differences between North and South Korea rather than focusing on possibilities for reconciliation.

In short, the Northeast Asia regional security environment consists of the following unstable attributes: high absolute military capabilities; abiding animus between key actors; deep albeit differentiated entanglement of the Big Four in Korean affairs; North Korea's recent emergence as a loose cannon in regional affairs; and the absence of multilateral security institutions (despite a relatively high level of intra-regional and international trade between actors). It is this unique, combustible cocktail of conventional and non-conventional threats that challenge scholars and policymakers alike to divine the shape of things to come in the emerging regional order.

Projects of the Northeast Asia Region

US Strategies for Regional Security
US officials and policy experts examine foreign policy and defense strategies for achieving regional security in four major areas of the world: Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Korean peninsula. (October 2001)

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Full Report (PDF 560 KB)

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Global Security Regimes: A Future or a Failure?
The central focus of this project will be the increasing loss of faith in bilateral arms control and disarmament between Great Powers (such as that between the United States and Russia) as well as multilateral forms of disarmament and nonproliferation such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

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Policy Bulletin (PDF 246 KB)
Report (PDF 62 KB)

Independent Task Force on US Strategies for National Security: Winning the Peace in the 21st Century
What is the ideal US strategic role in those regions of the world where strategic threats (WMD and missile proliferation) are combined with transnational terrorist actors, economic underdevelopment, resource competition, and heated ideological and military conflicts both within and across borders?

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Meeting Notes (PDF 59 KB)

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