ABSTRACT
Since the cold war wound down in 1989 Japan and the surrounding region—East Asia or, more broadly, the Asia-Pacific region—have been in a kind of holding pattern. The collapse of the cold-war setup meant that the world had to seek a new order, but such a paradigm has been slow to emerge. Although other regions find themselves in similar circumstances, the task of designing a new stable, peaceful post-cold war order in Asia and the Pacific has been regarded as especially difficult, since the events that put an end to the cold war did not occur in this region—a region where, in fact, vestiges of the cold-war order persist today.
