Change and Continuity: 1989–1997

Author(s):  
Andrew Yeo

This chapter demonstrates elements of change and continuity in Asia’s regional architecture between the waning years of the Cold War and the Asian financial crisis. Despite the external shock of the Cold War, I argue that the path to change is best captured by endogenous processes of change where mechanisms of change and continuity intersect. The first part of the chapter chronicles the development of two multilateral institutions: the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the ASEAN Regional Forum. The second part demonstrates the continuity of bilateral alliances, focusing on the US-Japan and US-Philippines alliance.

2015 ◽  
Vol 01 (04) ◽  
pp. 537-551
Author(s):  
Paul Evans

At a moment of strategic transition in Asia Pacific security, views differ widely on the inevitability of conflict and the prospects of a managed accommodation of great power relations. There is widespread agreement that economic integration is deep and valuable, that a power shift is underway, and that the new array of multilateral institutions are welcome but merely formative. At the end of the Cold War period, there was a creative moment in which key concepts like cooperative and comprehensive security underpinned an era of institution building. The essay argues that it is time to revisit these ideas and look at the fundamental elements of a security order appropriate to a diverse and increasingly interconnected region in the midst of a power transition. It examines some of the key ideas offered by security thinkers from several countries and pays particular attention to the concept of a consociational security order as an entree to constructive discussion. As important as the U.S.-China relationship is to a future security order, a G2 is neither likely nor desirable. The conclusion poses a series of questions that will need to be answered as a new version of cooperative security with 21st century characteristics is developed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Rob Wilson

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Tsuneo Akaha

How stable is the US-Japan security alliance in the post-Cold War era? Have the “end of history”, the “end of the Cold War”, the end of a “hegemonic world”, and the “end of geography” (or the beginning of a borderless world economy) so altered the national security needs and priorities of the United States and Japan that they no longer need or desire the security alliance they have maintained since 1952? Will the alliance remain the anchor of Japanese and US policies in the Asia-Pacific region? In the age of multilateralism, will the two countries seek multilateral alternatives that will replace the bilateral alliance? In this brief analysis, I will review the ongoing debate in Japan and in the United States concerning the future of the US-Japan security alliance in the post-Cold War era.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5564/mjia.v4i0.415 Mongolian Journal of International Affairs Vol.4 2007: 3-20


Author(s):  
Alice Garner ◽  
Diane Kirkby

During the Cold War the Fulbright program was considered an effective arm of US ‘soft power’ and cultural diplomacy. The US saw Australia as strategically valuable in the Asia-Pacific region of the world and under the Menzies Liberal Party government, Australia shared the US military and defence agenda. How could the Fulbright program maintain its independence from government interference in the powerful force of Cold War geopolitics? Australia’s Fulbright Board held strongly to the importance of independence and the role of academics to ensure that.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-92
Author(s):  
Sigit Candra Wiranata Kusuma ◽  
Aurelia V. T. Ngambut ◽  
Novelia Christina

The purpose of this paper is to analyse China and Russia’s relationship in terms of arms exports between both countries and its implications for the United States (US) using a qualitative method and the conceptual framework of Neorealism: hegemony and security cooperation. China and Russia are two great powers that have maintained close diplomatic ties since the Cold War Era. Both China and Russia cooperate in various sectors, including security. Since the collapse of the SU (USSR), which marked the establishment of post-Cold War Russia, the country has become a major arms exporter to China. This close relationship has dynamically developed in the last few decades. China-Russia security cooperation has been assessed as a security challenge for the US. The security cooperation between China, the new rival for the US since its rising, and Russia, the US’ former superpower rival in the Cold War era, is interpreted as a threat to US domination in the Asia-Pacific. However, this paper concludes that while China and Russia have a close relationship, China can surpass Russia’s military technology. That is why, although these countries relationships are close and Russia does not see China as its primary threat, this does not mean that Russia will let its guard down in facing China’s development. There is a tri-polar power balance between these countries and with the US. The main worry is if two actors get too close, leaving the remaining state isolated. Regardless of the global power equilibrium trajectory, China and Russia will become more closed than the US.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich

The academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was created to help fight the Cold War, part of a broader mobilization of the social sciences for national security needs. The Soviet strategic challenge rested on the ability of its economy to produce large numbers of sophisticated weapons. The military sector was the dominant part of the economy, and the most successful one. However, a comprehensive survey of scholarship on the Soviet economy from 1948-1991 shows that it paid little attention to the military sector, compared to other less important parts of the economy. Soviet secrecy does not explain this pattern of neglect. Western scholars developed strained civilian interpretations for several aspects of the economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. A close reading of the economic literature, combined with insights from other disciplines, suggest three complementary explanations for civilianization of the Soviet economy. Soviet studies was a peripheral field in economics, and its practitioners sought recognition by pursuing the agenda of the mainstream discipline, however ill-fitting their subject. The Soviet economy was supposed to be about socialism, and the military sector appeared to be unrelated to that. By stressing the militarization, one risked being viewed as a Cold War monger. The conflict identified in this book between the incentives of academia and the demands of policy makers (to say nothing of accurate analysis) has broad relevance for national security uses of social science.


Author(s):  
Bhubhindar Singh

Northeast Asia is usually associated with conflict and war. Out of the five regional order transitions from the Sinocentric order to the present post–Cold War period, only one was peaceful, the Cold War to post–Cold War transition. In fact, the peaceful transition led to a state of minimal peace in post–Cold War Northeast Asia. As the chapter discusses, this was due to three realist-liberal factors: America’s hegemonic role, strong economic interdependence, and a stable institutional structure. These factors not only ensured development and prosperity but also mitigated the negative effects of political and strategic tensions between states. However, this minimal peace is in danger of unraveling. Since 2010, the region is arguably in the early stages of another transition fueled by the worsening Sino-US competition. While the organizing ideas of liberal internationalism—economic interdependence and institutional building—will remain resilient, whether or not minimal peace is sustainable will be determined by the outcome of the US-China competition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452110179
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ramos

This article deals with the influence of Gen. George C. Marshall on the foundation of the US intelligence community after the Second World War. It argues that his uneven achievements demonstrate how the ceaseless wrangling within the Truman administration undermined the crafting of a coherent intelligence policy. Despite his bureaucratic skills and prominent positions, Marshall struggled to achieve his ends on matters like signals intelligence, covert action, or relations between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet he crafted an enduring vision of how intelligence should supplement US national security policy that remained potent throughout the Cold War and beyond.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”


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