1 - POLITICAL OUTLOOK 1996–97

Summary

Southeast Asian security is intertwined with the overall East Asian/ I Western Pacific situation. The East Asian picture today is a mixed one. The optimism about the future of the region based on a number of positive factors is now tempered with some political and security uncertainties. Tensions have built up in the Taiwan Strait which carry risks of military conflict and serious implications for U.S.-China relations. The situation on the Korean peninsula also looks more dangerous than it did a year ago. But first, the positive factors.

Positive Factors

These are well known. Most of the East Asian economies continue to roar ahead and economic interdependence continues to grow. The relationship between economics and interstate security is a complex one. It depends upon what forces impinge upon decision-making at any particular juncture. However, the relationship has been a positive one in much of East Asia in recent years. High growth rates also help to keep domestic social and political problems manageable. For instance, sharp declines in economic growth in countries such as Indonesia and China, which have serious underlying social problems, could produce social and political instability.

In the political-security field, relations between the major powers — the United States, China, Japan, and Russia — if not always amicable, have not been characterized by enmity, as was the case during the Cold War. The U.S. military presence and the U.S.-Japan defence alliance, widely regarded as the linchpin of East Asian security, continue and their importance was reaffirmed in the February 1995 U.S. Department of Defence document entitled United States Security Strategy for the East Asian Region.

ASEAN has been enormously successful as a confidence-building mechanism among its members and will continue to discourage interstate conflict within the Southeast Asian subregion. And in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole there is unprecedented dialogue on political, security, and economic issues at both the bilateral and multilateral levels. Two important region-wide multilateral institutions, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, have been established in recent years for dialogue and co-operation on security and economics, respectively.