ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, the East-West global conflict ended, but a new global equilibrium has yet to emerge, and much of the basic Cold War infrastructure remains intact. In Europe, the process of reconciliation and the construction of a true post-Cold War order has involved the dismantling and recasting of the alliance system and the positive transcendence of the hostilities of World War II by symbolic apologies, reconciliations, and cooperations in the construction of a shared memory and a shared understanding of the past; but this has no real parallel in East Asia. The U.S. and Japanese rapprochement with China and the Indochina settlements in the 1970s certainly modified the Cold War confrontation. In addition the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of diplomatic ties by South Korea with China and Russia, and the admission of both North and South Korea to the United Nations in the early 1990s did so even more dramatically, but such changes have merely cast into sharp relief the residual Cold War foundations of inter-state relations in the East Asia region. Despite the economic might of both Japan and (South) Korea, substantial foreign troops remain based on their soil, Korea remains divided, and the defense arrangements of the region consist primarily of bilateral treaties with the United States.
