Great Expectations: Washington, Beijing, and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
Abstract Throughout the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Bush administration has believed that China is the most crucial player in the effort to find a solution. Washington has frequently expressed disappointment that Beijing is not willing to put more pressure on its misbehaving client. China faces a dilemma, however. Although most evidence indicates that Chinese leaders are not happy about Pyongyang's quest for nuclear weapons, keeping the Korean peninsula nonnuclear is not China's highest priority. Beijing is even more concerned about preserving North Korea as a geographic buffer between the U.S. sphere of influence in Northeast Asia and the Chinese homeland. China does have substantial economic leverage over North Korea, since it supplies a major portion of the country's food and energy supplies. The PRC is cautious, however, about using that leverage to coerce Pyongyang regarding the nuclear issue. Chinese leaders fear that putting too much pressure on Kim Jong Il's regime could cause the North Korea...
Understanding Northeast Asian regional dynamics: inventory checking and new discourses on power, interest, and identity
Northeast Asia has emerged as the center of gravity in contemporary international relations (IRs), partly owing to China’s rise, over the past two decades. In understanding regional dynamics in Northeast Asia, the (neo-) realist perspective has been dominant. Despite its rich analytical and empirical contribution, however, preoccupation with power and its distribution, blurred geographic focus, and built-in status quo bias have prevented the existing realist literature to capture the new reality of the region that can be characterized by trends toward liberal transition, the politics of national identity, and growing correlates of perception, domestic politics, and regional interactions. Against this backdrop, we attempt to undertake an inventory checking of new discourses on power, interest, and identity in accounting for regional
SOUTH KOREA BETWEEN EAGLE AND DRAGON
The decade of the 1990s began with the demise of the Soviet empire and the subsequent retreat of Russia from the center stage of Northeast Asia, leaving the United States in a search to adjust its policies in the region. The “rise of China,” escalating cross-strait tension since 1995, North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship and missile challenges, latent irredentism, and the pivotal economic importance of Northeast Asia have all led the United States to re-emphasize its role and involvement in the region.1 This redefinition of the American mission has in turn led to the consolidation of the U.S.-Japan alliance, exemplified by the 1997 Defense Guideline revision, as well as to the establishment of trilateral consultative organizations such as the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) among the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. The increasingly proactive posture by the U.S. has, however, generated grave strategic concerns on the part of China and Russia, which have sought to circumscribe America’s hegemonic parameters in Asia both bilaterally and multilaterally (i.e., the formation of the “Shanghai Six” and the Boao Asia Forum, as well as China’s call for an Association of Southeast Asian Nations