4 - Divergence Amidst Convergence: Assessing Southeast and Northeast Asian Security Dynamics

Summary

“Rubik's Cube”: Conceptualizing Asian Security

Commensurate with Asia's phenomenal rise over the past three decades as a major economic bloc with matching political influences and military capabilities, understanding the core undercurrents and drivers of Asian security has assumed centre stage for two main reasons. First, the rise to the fore of Asia's strategically consequential powers — including the Big Three (China, Japan, and India) and key middle powers such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and South Korea — have opened unparalleled opportunities for the global economy with relatively greater influences in determining the global strategic balance. And second, while no major wars have been fought in Asia since the end of the Vietnamese War in 1975, the region confronts a range of security threats and challenges that are unprecedented in their magnitude, potential systemic impacts, and domestic political repercussions.

Indeed, one could arguably assert that no other “region” in the world faces such a broad and deep compendium of security challenges as East Asia in the early stages of the twenty-first century. In this context, understanding the various strands and associated networks of security heritages and emerging issues from Southeast and Northeast Asian perspectives are crucial, although complicated by the contrasting security perceptions and approaches in these two major sub-regions of East Asia. Increasingly connected and dependent on each other's markets, goods, and services, Southeast and Northeast Asia share a wide range of security imperatives yet they remain separate in important aspects primarily, although not exclusively, due to relatively weaker major power contestations in Southeast Asia and greater sensitivities to a range of non-traditional security issues.

The push for a regional identity and cooperative security in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia's search for a more stable regional order in the context of intense major-power competition and cooperation means that no single, overarching concept or theory can readily explain the centripetal and centrifugal forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the Asian strategic landscape.