Fractured Strategic Alliance, Restructured Economic Cooperation: Korea at the Helm of the Emerging Northeast Asian Order

Abstract

An increasingly fractured alliance system comprising the “strategic triangle” – the United States–Japan–Korea – based on the San Francisco Treaty (1951) and the US–Korea Mutual Defense Treaty (1953) has unleashed dormant economic forces actively seeking regional economic cooperation in Northeast Asia.1 In the post–Cold War period, four disjunctions – the Asian financial crisis of 1997; September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington; the rise of China and emerging Sino-Russian rapprochement; and the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 – have caused serious damage to the Northeast Asian strategic calculations based on the “US hub and various spokes” model. These disjunctions have caused the emergence of strategic interest divergence, leading to Korea’s ambivalent attitude toward the Cold War era alliance structure; Japan’s fresh beginning aimed at “re-entering Asia”; China’s exclusionary regionalism, falling under the concept of “Asia for Asians”; Russia’s renewed push for multilateralism in Northeast Asia ; and the increasing fear of US “strategic abandonment” due to its increasing involvement in combating the global terror menace in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.