At the crossroads of Northeast Asia, South Korea provides a critical vantage point for viewing changes in the region. This comprehensive review of the past quarter century covers its strategic thinking in regard to China, Japan, Russia, regionalism, and reunification.

At the crossroads of Northeast Asia, South Korea provides a critical vantage point for viewing changes in the region. This comprehensive review of the past quarter century covers its strategic thinking in regard to China, Japan, Russia, regionalism, and reunification.

Japanese leaders and often the media too have substituted symbols for strategy in dealing with Asia. This comprehensive review of four periods over twenty years exposes the strategic gap in viewing individually and collectively China, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, Russia, Central Asia, and regionalism.

This book traces the development of Chinese thinking over four periods from the 1980s on and covers strategies toward: Russia and Central Asia, Japan, the Korean peninsula, Southeast and South Asia, and regionalism. It compares strategic thinking, arguing that the level was lowest under Jiang Zemin and highest under Hu Jintao.

The book explains the Putin era's ambivalent approach to Asia and finds lessons from earlier approaches worthy of further attention. The overview compares how strategic thinking evolved, while reflecting on factors that shaped it.

In this volume, experts on East Asia focus on each of the past five decades to explain the weak predictive power of traditional IR theory as applied to the region and uncover the true forces driving change.

Against the backdrop of China’s mounting influence and North Korea’s growing nuclear capability and expanding missile arsenal, South Korea faces a set of strategic choices that will shape its economic prospects and national security. In South Korea at the Crossroads, Scott A. Snyder examines the trajectory of fifty years of South Korean foreign policy and offers predictions—and a prescription—for the future. Pairing a historical perspective with a shrewd understanding of today’s political landscape, Snyder contends that South Korea’s best strategy remains investing in a robust alliance with the United States. Snyder begins with South Korea’s effort in the 1960s to offset the risk of abandonment by the United States during the Vietnam War and the subsequent crisis in the alliance during the 1970s. A series of shifts in South Korean foreign relations followed: the “Nordpolitik” engagement with the Soviet Union and China at the end of the Cold War; Kim Dae Jung’s “Sunshine Policy,” designed to bring North Korea into the international community; “trustpolitik,” which sought to foster diplomacy with North Korea and Japan; and changes in South Korea’s relationship with the United States. Despite its rise as a leader in international financial, development, and climate-change forums, South Korea will likely still require the commitment of the United States to guarantee its security. Although China is a tempting option, Snyder argues that only the United States is both credible and capable in this role. South Korea remains vulnerable relative to other regional powers in northeast Asia despite its rising profile as a middle power, and it must balance the contradiction of desirable autonomy and necessary alliance.

The Northeast Asian security environment is closely linked to Korea’s growth perspectives for the future. The spectacular rise of the South Korean economy in the past half century, also known as “Miracle on the Han River,” has been duly highlighted as one of the most successful cases of economic development worldwide. However, among the factors curbing South Korea’s growth perspectives has been, from the very beginning of its rise, the coexistence of the difficult neighbour to the North, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. While in the cold war this coexistence has been taken as inevitable, after the end of the cold war there were hopes to overcome this obstacle to further growth either through collapse or enhanced cooperation with the North, neither of which became reality. North Korea’s unprecedented aggressiveness and development of long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear devices, made this threat truly an international question with multilateral talks coming into existence as ad-hoc measures to cope with the nuclear crisis. It was then that the idea of a Northeast Asian Security Community was born. The contributions in this book discuss how a peaceful solution of the security problems could not only enhance stability of Korea’s economy and reduce the defense burden considerably (the so-called peace dividend), but would facilitate regional investments safer and regional solutions for common economic problems. When discussing the possibilities of a security framework or, in an institutionalized form, security community, in Northeast Asia, the authors in this volume are realistic as to not fall into the trap of wishful thinking, which so often has characterized approaches to North Korea resulting in disappointment. The past two years again saw the rising of tensions in Northeast Asia and the masterful way in which even an impoverished and isolated country can play its cards. While it seems a new ice age between the two Koreas is possible, nevertheless and maybe even more than ever the search for a stable security framework for Northeast Asia as a precondition for peaceful economic cooperation and development will go on. The chapters in this volume contribute to the ongoing debate to secure peace and development in Northeast Asia, making this book of interest to both academics and policy-makers alike.

This collection of essays by leading scholars from Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States examines how and why bitter historical memories have resurfaced in recent years as freshly virulent and contentious issues between Japan and its neighbors—especially China and South Korea. Moreover, it seeks to identify what set of conditions and what sequence of measures will enable these modern nations to manage, palliate, and exorcise the wrongs of the past in a spirit of reconciliation, so that the dangerous growth of nationalist resentments and revanchism can be checked. Comfort women ... the Yasukuni Shrine ... the history textbook controversies ... The single sorest issue confronting East Asia today is the growing animosity and conflict between Japan and its neighbors—especially China and South Korea—over their respective and collective memories of Japan's pre-1945 militaristic aggression, oppression, and atrocities. Even as East Asia has established itself as one of the most vibrant economic regions of the world, the strident nationalisms that have emerged here in the post-Cold War period have exacerbated historical grievances and heightened the international tensions that separate Japan from China and South Korea, blocking the development of an international system based on comity and cooperation.

With its unstable and intermittent nuclear weapon project, and the recent leadership succession issue, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been a source of insecurity for the past decade in this region, in addition to the delicate international relations among the powerful China, United States, Japan, and Russia. The essence of DPRK issue lies in the instability and uncertainty of nuclear development that even the slightest miscalculation by any one power could disturb the sensitive balance of relationships, creating a butterfly effect with a catastrophic result. Drawing on various perspectives on the interaction over DPRK and other regional powers, this volume seeks to explore the role of DPRK in Northeast Asia, and its implication to regional security as a whole. The volume does not confirm a particular position over DPRK’s nuclear showdown; rather it invites scholars to provide assessments from the viewpoints of neighbouring powers in order to present a more complete understanding of the leading issue in Northeast Asia. The volume will serve as an invaluable resource for policymakers, students and scholars of North Korean politics and international relations. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Comparative Asian Development.