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This paper examines how APEC has transformed itself into an international forum for the vision of regional integration. It aims to quantify the documentation produced by the international organization and provide quantifiable evidence that aligns with prior knowledge rather than relying solely on intuition. For this purpose, I use various text mining techniques to extract multi-dimensional features from the text of APEC Leaders' Declarations from 1993 to 2023. In terms of interest and expectations for APEC as a forum, it is found that members have experienced two major peaks and troughs over the last three decades. It is found that the change point coincides with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the tensions between the United States and China since 2017. To explore more various aspects of economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region, this study also considers how consistently APEC has been an international forum for addressing issues, which members are active, and how members have clustered based on their views of APEC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategic matrix of Asia-Pacific is nowadays revolving around the US pivot and rebalancing policy vis-à-vis China. The landscape is reflecting a complex state of interdependence between the US, China, and their allies. China prima facie is strengthening its economic base before robustly embarking upon modernization of its armed forces to counter-balance the US. The security environment is poised to sustain the status quo in order to avoid the detrimental effects upon their intertwined economic interests. It is argued that states are inclined to maximize their power. Chinese rise is no exception and, the rise of peer-competitor is not expected to be peaceful, testifies the past historical record. This would eventually swing the future contours of world politics toward the second phase of China-centric Cold War. Therefore, in spite of interdependence, traditionally the nation-states would tend to search for enemies thereby pushing them to accordingly recalibrate and redefine their national interests on diverse and fluid geostrategic trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the need to preserve the foreign relation between China and the U.S. despite the decision of the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to pivot its foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region.

Asia Pacific is a global growth engine and remaining cognizant to this fact, the US is striving to maintain its regional supremacy. China has achieved a remarkable growth in last two decades while the US was involved in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current transformation of China at global landscape forced the US policy makers to revisit and review their strategic priorities in Asia Pacific to harness the China's expanding political clout. Thus, Sino-US strategic engagement in Asia-Pacific is quite significant under the prevailing geo-political landscape and deems thorough research. The US-China strategic engagement in Asia-Pacific is a blend of cooperation and competition simultaneously. In keeping with the core realist theories and postulates of power transition, the US is and will remain as a dominant power. However, economically the US is giving away its some influence which is taken over by China. The US think tanks consider China as a competitor and hence managing China's rise is a test case for the US diplomacy in Asia-Pacific. China as a rising power has posed a substantial challenge to the US led global order. The research concludes that contrary to the US approaches the China is currently focusing on soft power approach and pursuing a peaceful rise to extend its economic signature across the globe to economically influence the regional geo-political order. US-China clash of geo-strategic interests in Asia-Pacific has led to regional polarization and the phenomenon is quite devastating in South Asia with two nuclear armed arch rivals India-Pakistan. Thus, the developing global scenarios merits visibility of both powers strategies so that the world may not witness another catastrophe owing to great powers engagement. Pakistan also needs to put its house in order and keep its policy open instead of aligning any power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]