ABSTRACT
The first part of this chapter presents a brief setting and a thorough survey of the political and economic scene. It deals with the prospects of collective security. National inward-looking tendencies have been heightened at the expense of international cooperative political, economic and security arrangements. Though the two leading spokesmen for the Nixon Doctrine—the President and his Secretary of State—proclaimed repeatedly that the US will ‘keep its commitments’ a general uneasiness about US credibility rippled through the capitals of our Asian partners in collective security. Especially the US seems determined to consolidate the defence of Northeast Asia with the US-Japan security system as a cornerstone for stability in the Asia-Pacific region.
