ABSTRACT
Both scholars and practitioners in the field of international politics have experienced a growing unease about the validity and viability of long-prevailing political and intellectual beliefs. The singular importance of postwar US-Soviet relations and the strategic nuclear competition that so shaped these ties testifies to the existence of a vastly different structure of international power. Yet newly established regimes in Asia have not developed in a vacuum. They have emerged within the context of an unstable international environment—with external imperatives frequently encountered in terms of a superior military presence. The remembrance of such constraints occupies a central position in the political and military conceptions that elites in Asia and elsewhere have adopted. The future relationship between the major states of Asia and a global strategic system will continue to reflect such historical remembrances; this factor should be kept in mind.
