ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on security threats, it is important to stress that virtually all nations in the region overwhelmingly emphasize the priority they all accord to economic growth. Moreover, there are two important, unprecedented trends: the degree and character of burgeoning economic interdependence—both transpacific and intra-Asian—and democratization. Ironically, the goals of enhancing human rights and democracy, which the United States is seeking to put on fast-forward, are unfolding in any case propelled by the social and economic consequences of the failure of other political systems and the Asia Pacific’s economic dynamism. The difficulties experienced in the creation of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation suggest that it will be, at best, a very protracted process before the Asia Pacific finds organizational expression for the notion of a security community in the Pacific. Asia was sobered by the example of Leninist states in hot and cold nationalist conflict with each other: Sino-Soviet, Sino-Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-Khmer.
