ABSTRACT
Unlike Europe, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact alliances confronted each other for forty years, the security structure in the Asia-Pacific was not characterized by multilateral arrangements during the Cold War. Partly because Asian communist states (China, North Korea, and the people’s republics of Indochina) were more independent of the Soviet Union, and also because U.S. allies in Northeast and Southeast Asia had little in common, security links to both Moscow and Washington were essentially bilateral. Even with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the United States chose not to abandon its bilateral defense treaties with Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia. The Bush administration remained suspicious to its very end that multilateral security would undermine America’s ties to its primary Asian allies and generally weaken U.S. influence in the region.
