How is Northeast Asia changing?
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By Stephen Costello
China has opened a high-speed railway to Dandong on the North Korean border from Shenyang. That line would run 207 kilometers (127 miles), and will shorten the journey from three hours to just over an hour, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Also, on the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers Party, North Korea will host a delegation from the Chinese Communist Party beginning this Friday. The delegation will be headed by Liu Yunshan, a member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee and fifth in line in the Party hierarchy. The visit comes as relations have become strained since Kim Jung Un replaced his deceased father in December 2011.
The South Korean administration seems to believe that it can use its economic influence to press China to force or lean on North Korea for diplomatic concessions. This is doubtful, and it is an example of wasting the powers that South Korea has assembled over the past decades. This power could be used to put Korean diplomats in leadership positions on both inter-Korean relations and regional economic and security discussions. For instance, the Korean administration could declare that they will address the political and security threats that the North Koreans perceive, but they will need China's help in capping and rolling back nuclear programs. That will not happen for now.
William Overholt has published an insightful article on Chinese and US economic policy. It should be a must-read for those concerned about the TPP and the coming US presidential elections. One of Overholt's points is that the US Congress and White House leaders have made international economic policy impossible for the US since 2001. They have prioritized military spending and policies and starved the country of creative economic leadership, in his view. Even the TPP structure would lessen rather than expand US influence and interests. See the article in the September 2015 issue of International Economy at www.international-economy.com
How will middle powers in East Asia – Australia, Japan and South Korea in particular – influence Chinese and US behavior in the next few years? This question, including the evolution and posture of ASEAN toward US-China rivalry, is addressed on the lead essay this week by Professor Peter Drysdale, editor of the excellent East Asia Forum, anchored at the Australian National University. He suggests that East Asia may challenge current mainstream thinking about security and “great power rivalry” in the region, largely because of its middle powers and its experience with ASEAN. Watching ASEAN try to become more decisive and more focused on its core mission will be a key whether it can remain independent and consequential.
Japan's changing role in the region is another subject for wide-ranging debate, and its domestic upheaval over the new defense guidelines suggests that some long-held assumptions will not last. One of the best treatments of this question can be found at the East Asia Forum site by Sourabh Gupta of Samuels International in Washington. He noted on 20 September that the new guidelines are based on two assumptions, that “Japan’s external security environment is rapidly deteriorating; and that US deterrent power in Asia is diminishing, with knock-on effects for US–Japan security arrangements.” Gupta goes on to say, “Both rationalisations are contestable. The withering of Japan’s security environment is a function of the insecurity generated by its own economic decline (rather than China’s rise) and its discomfiture in striking up a mutually beneficial political equation with Beijing. Meanwhile, the pre-eminence of US hard power in Asia seems assured. ‘Escaping the post-war regime’ and its pacifist constraints, rather than deterrence, appears to provide a more likely motivation.”
In Korea there is a great deal of controversy over the book by former NIS Director Kim Man Book, and his vague claim that a hot-line existed between the two Koreas during the presidencies of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun. Rather than focus on the matter of keeping secrets, the point that should be made is how disastrous and self-limiting the refusal to talk directly to North Korea's leaders has been for the South. Only in the resulting isolation could it be considered appropriate or necessary for the ROK president to go to Beijing or New York in order to make points – few of them helpful – to her northern counterpart.
What do these different developments have in common? They suggest that events will unfold in the region in ways not anticipated by many current government leaders, scholars and journalists. Interests among a larger group of actors are now overlapping, and that complicates common assumptions. Democratic progress and security may not be getting better, but non-great powers and other forces in the region now have greater capabilities to determine what comes next.
Stephen Costello is producer of AsiaEast, a Web
and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused
on security, development and politics in Northeast
Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. He
can be contacted at cosetllos@asiaeast.org.