The Contemporary Challenges to Regional Peace and Security

Security can be conceptualized as comprehensive and multidimensional, whose core goal is the achievement of well-being, whether of the region, the nation state, the society, the community or the individual. It has military, political, economic, socio-psychological, cultural, and ecological dimensions.1 Cooperation between and among states is necessary in order to bring security about. Peace ensues when the security of relevant actors is attained. For the purpose of this paper, however, while a comprehensive view of security is being adopted, it will only pertain to the level of the nation state and the Asia Pacific region.

While there are numerous challenges to the security of nation states and the Asia Pacific region, because of time constraints and in the interest of brevity, only the most important are included in this discussion.

A. Flexibility and Fluidity of Regional Politics

The end of superpower competition removed the stabilizing impact of the balance of power that underpinned global and regional security for over four decades. While the Asia Pacific was not the main theatre in superpower competition, the global character of the Cold War, nevertheless, required the creation of a network of bilateral and multilateral military alliances led by the United States in the post-war period. Known as the San Francisco system, this network of alliances enabled an American military presence in various military bases in allied territory, thereby providing the region with a security umbrella. The cornerstone of this alliance system and security umbrella was the US-Japan Security Treaty. China played the role of a balancer after the Sino-Soviet rift in the 1960s. Under this stable strategic environment, rapid economic development took place in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, followed soon after by Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

This environment was fundamentally altered with the end of the Cold War. As the only remaining superpower in the world, the US continued to provide a security umbrella for the region through the San Francisco system of alliances, new access arrangements for its military forces with Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, and a much-diminished physical presence due to the end of its basing arrangement with the Philippines and the drawing down of its forces from the Asia Pacific.

Despite a continuing US military presence, however, there is a lack of a settled regional order compared to the period of the Cold War because of the perceived uncertainty of US commitment to the security of the region. Despite various articulation of its security commitment in the form of policy papers such as the one known as the East Asian Strategic Initiative II,2 the absence of a known enemy makes the US commitment a doubtful one in the eyes of its Asian allies. This perception is reinforced by the assessment that US power is in relative decline,3 circumscribed by continuing economic problems and the rise of isolationist sentiments at home.

In addition, regional détentes that followed glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s led to a change in the regional strategic environment, leading key states like China and India to restructure their forces. Their goal of military modernization, together with those of small and medium-sized states in the region, has made them parts of an emerging multipolar structure of power in the Asia Pacific, particularly when economic power is thrown into the equation. Military modernization and force restructuring, the probability of nuclear proliferation within the context of the availability of military inventories from the former Soviet Union and other arms merchants, and new wealth in North-East and South-East Asia have combined to raise the prospects for an arms race in the region.4

The uncertainty of this emerging regional order is itself a security challenge, not only because of the perceived lack of credibility of the commitment to regional peace and security of the US as the regional and global policeman; there are also states whose foreign policy intentions could be seeking to alter the status quo by initiating sometime in the future actions inimical to regional peace and stability which are beyond the capacity of the smaller states in the region to restrain unilaterally.5

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 777