ABSTRACT
This is a collection of essays on contemporary international security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. If the end of the Cold War has dominated and transformed the security agenda in Europe and the Atlantic, then its effect on the Asia-Pacific region has been somewhat more equivocal. Although this collection uses the term ‘post-Cold War’, the phrase has somewhat different connotations for the Asia-Pacific region: it is used less in terms of defining the security agenda than as a description of the contemporary era. But this is not to say that the Asia-Pacific region has been unaffected by the end of the Cold War. Post-Cold War military restructuring will have a major impact on the US presence in the region; the disappearance of the communist threat assisted in undermining the legitimacy and credibility of the previously dominant Liberal Democratic Party in Japan; and communist North Korea’s growing international isolation may have helped to spur its nuclear programme. Nevertheless, many of the dominant trends and influences in Asia-Pacific security pre-date the end of the Cold War, and although they may have been affected by the collapse of communism in Europe (directly or indirectly) they were not decisively determined by events there, the region’s security agenda has not been re-cast, nor have the major issues been redefined.
