ABSTRACT
Japan’s defeat in World War II might have allowed the Soviet Union to emerge as the dominant power in Northeast Asia. Instead, of course, the United States established an alliance system to contain the Soviet Union and, in the process, built up a powerful U.S.-led regional order. Even so, a Soviet-led socialist regional order did take shape in Northeast Asia, based on communist revolution and the planned economy model. It was, to be sure, brief. Communism in Asia collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellite, Mongolia, in 1991, but well before then, China repudiated much of the Soviet model, which left North Korea as the sole remaining piece of the post–World War II socialist order in Northeast Asia. Though short-lived, this socialist variant of regionalism had multiple ramifications, and its legacies can still be felt.
