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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) appears today as a mature, comprehensive, and inclusive intergovernmental regional organization. However, co-piloted by China and Russia, the SCO’s course still raises many questions about its objectives, priorities, and, more important, its achievements and raison d’être, as well as the enduring rivalries among its members.

Fast aging in Northeast Asia has significant implications for the geopolitics and security dynamics of the region. The long-term impact of graying populations and substantial increases in social security spending might limit the regional arms race. By 2030, Japan, South Korea, and China will become too old for military rivalry.

The “ASEAN family” of regional security institutions has a mixed record: it has proved very helpful in improving interstate trust, fairly helpful in managing peaceful change, somewhat helpful in enhancing regime stability, but virtually useless in resolving interstate conflict. Overall, East Asia remains dominated by conventional forms of international relations.

The institutionalization of China-ASEAN non-traditional security cooperation is underappreciated, even though its significance should be apparent to Western analysts. Appreciating China-ASEAN non-traditional security cooperation leads to the realization that it has strategic significance, and that the broader China-ASEAN multilateral process is the most institutionally developed expression of East Asian regionalism today.

Since 1992, Mongolia has sought to embed itself and its neighbors, Russia and China, in regional security arrangements and international law. This strategy can be categorized as preventive diplomacy and involves seeking to create a climate in which conflict will not arise, rather than managing conflict after it has emerged.

Russia's contribution to regional security and economic cooperation in Asia remains mixed. Record oil prices in 2006 highlighted Russia's potential position as a key energy supplier, but the government's priority has been on strengthening its hold over the industry, increasingly to the detriment of its foreign energy partners.

Analysis of Japan-South Korea security interaction shows a solidifying security relationship rooted less in threats from North Korea and more in shared economic interests. Remarkable as the ongoing security relationship is, it is limited in operation and narrowly focused. This has implications for regional security organization and proponents of the U.S.-Japan-South Korea “virtual alliance.”

The interaction between China and Japan as well as their relations with the United States will be critical in determining the future of the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century. Protracted tensions or conflict between Beijing and Tokyo could destabilize the region and strain U.S. bilateral ties with one or both countries. Efforts by the United States to strengthen relations with one power may strain ties with the other or between the two. This triangular dynamic is especially evident in China's reaction to steps taken by Washington to revitalize and reshape the U.S.-Japan alliance for the post-Cold War era and in Japan's uneasiness about improvements in SinoAmerican relations. The triangular relationship among China, Japan and the United States is complicated by Washington's asymmetrical ties with Japan and China. Japan is a long-standing and close American ally despite chronic differences over trade and other issues. The U.S.-Japan alliance is a keystone of the U.S. strategic position in Asia as well as Asia-Pacific security and stability. The United States recently has sought to strengthen and broaden the alliance, maintain Tokyo's confidence in the U.S. commitment to Japan's security, and cooperate closely with the Japanese on regional security issues, including mutual concerns about China's rising power and assertive behavior. China on the other hand is a former quasi-ally with which the U.S. maintained close strategic cooperation against the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has become a nation which is "neither friend nor foe" of the United States. The U.S. has a number of chronic bilateral disputes with China as well as a wide range of common interests. Although Sino-U.S. ties have become more

Close observers of India's foreign relations in the 1980s disagreed about whether New Delhi's policies toward its smaller neighbors in South Asia' were driven by a clear regional security doctrine. The author of one major study of Indian foreign policy under Indira Gandhi found that "no Indian version of the Monroe Doctrine has functioned in Southern Asia."2 Another analyst agreed, declaring in his comprehensive examination of Indian security policy

Toward a Global Western Alliance Organization The buildup of Soviet military forces in East Asia and the Pacific since the mid-1970s has been striking. Today, Soviet military influence threatens to extend over the entire region. Despite this alarming development, the region's Western-aligned nations' have hardly made any attempt to create a new collective security system. The basic framework for the regional security of the West Pacific remains virtually as it was in the 1950s. There appear to be two major reasons for this failure. The first is that the nations that are located in the East Asia/Pacific theater front are racially, historically, culturally, and economically different from each other, have not always had common interests, and have had mutually diverse ties for a long time. The second reason lies in the region's large number of island nations that are geographically far apart. As a result, there has been a great disparity in the extent to which they are threatened by the Soviets and indeed in how they perceive this threat. Nevertheless, since the end of the 1970s, these nations have all come to have in common the fact that they are confronted by a massive Soviet military machine. The emergence of the Soviets' ocean-going fleet since the "Okean '75" exercise, the reinforced Pacific fleet, and the use of Soviet airand seapower based in Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay have placed in danger the security of the Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC), on