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This article seeks to provide a theoretically compelling account for North Korea's strategic choice to go nuclear and explores its implications for East Asian security. Its main research question is as follows: despite the obvious risks of going nuclear, what makes North Korea so desperate in its pursuit of nuclear capabilities? Contrary to the extant accounts that only emphasize either nonsecurity variables or an "external security" factor, this article conceptualizes North Korea's security considerations as "regime survival" and explains its strategic choice from it. The central thesis of this article is that North Korea's decision to go nuclear is a strategic choice, of which the purpose is to achieve its goals of safeguarding independence from external powers as well as ensuring regime security. North Korea pursues nuclear weapons because they not only protect Pyongyang's regime from foreign aggressions but also help to consolidate Kim Jong-un's domestic power. North Korea also seeks nuclear weapons in order to safeguard its independence and autonomy from China because the removal of China's influence is critical to ensuring its regime survival in the long run. North Korea's strategic choice to go nuclear and its emergence as a de facto nuclear power have significant implications for East Asian security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to critically assess the relevance of International Relations Theory (IRT) for East Asia International Relations (IR). After identifying the shortcomings of IRT in explaining East Asia IR, the article provides several ways to modify it with a goal to make it more suitable for East Asia IR. Its central claim is that the IRT's bias toward European experiences and great power politics generates unsatisfactory accounts for and inaccurate predictions about East Asia IR. This does not mean, however, that we should treat IRT as completely irrelevant and develop an indigenous theory of East Asia IR. Given that no single theory is complete and perfectly relevant across time and space and that many core concepts and key variables of IRT are also pertinent for East Asia IR, our efforts should instead be made to refine the existing IRT and make it more suitable for East Asia IR by problematising its major assumptions and central claims on the basis of East Asian experiences. This will save IRT from being a region-specific and a country-specific theory of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of South Korea’s strategic choices over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in light of the Sino–US competition in post-Cold War East Asia. South Korea’s puzzling behavior here represents Seoul’s hedging strategy against the uncertain future of the Sino–US competition in East Asia. The driving force of South Korea’s hedging behavior is Seoul’s dual concerns about being excessively dependent on the USA for its security at the time of China’s rapid rise on the one hand and being pulled into a growing China’s sphere of influence at the expense of traditional US–ROK security ties on the other. Reflecting Seoul’s prudent balancing acts between the two superpowers, South Korea’s hedging often results in apparently indecisive and underdetermined strategic choices in the face of the intensifying Sino–US competition. Nevertheless, South Korea’s hedging strategy allows Seoul to deepen extensive economic ties with Beijing while maintaining a traditional security alliance with Washington. The hedging behavior of South Korea, which is uniquely positioned as a strategic partner of rapidly rising China as well as a key security ally of the rebalancing USA, sheds important light on the behavior of middle powers in alliance politics, which has largely been neglected in the current literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]