ABSTRACT
Today’s Asia-Pacific is a region where, despite the potential for significant instability and tension, there are important emerging signs of enhanced bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Compared with other parts of the globe – either the Middle East (where the war in Iraq, the challenge of Al Qaeda, the proliferation challenge posed by Iran, and the long-standing Arab-Israeli standoff are all sources of instability), or Central Asia (where the US-led coalition remains embroiled in the Afghan conflict), the Asia Pacific presents a more variegated picture, in which interstate tension and new security challenges are offset by new opportunities for cooperation, challenging past patterns of rivalry. Traditional tensions over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme, or over the status and independence of Taiwan remain important, but arguably no longer act as destabilizing flashpoints or trip wires for immediate conflict in the way they did during the Cold War. Nonetheless, in a more fluid post-Cold War environment, there are real tensions based on competition between the region’s major powers, most notably traditional large states such as the United States and China, to enhance their regional influence economically, politically and militarily in pursuit of regional dominance or hegemony. These states are joined by rising ‘middle powers’1 with aspirations either to acquire new influence or reclaim part or all of their former regional status, creating in the process added uncertainty. A still powerful Japan, despite facing economic difficulties at home, is promoting a more assertive set of foreign and security policies as part of its transformation into a more ‘normal’ power;2 India, given its rapid economic growth and its demographic heft (with a population of more than one billion), is pursuing a ‘hedging’ strategy of new pragmatic relations with China and the United States;3 while Russia, since March 2008 under the new dyarchy of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, embraces a recidivist foreign policy in which energy and resource diplomacy have served (at least until the recent decline in oil prices) as key weapons for enhancing and expanding its regional influence and status, in the process bringing it into an increasingly fractious relationship with the United States.4
