ABSTRACT
As the millennium approaches its end, the Cold War already shrinks into perspective as a relatively brief episode, and the deeper structural transformations long obscured by its drama are likely to prove of much greater long-term significance. The combination of the political cir cumstance of its dissolution with the economic circumstance of the rise of the whole East Asian region lends further force to the process of historical reconsideration. From the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, some commentators see the world entering a new and noless fraught era, in which the fault lines of rival civilizations replace those of hostile ideologies.1
