Managing Hegemony in Asia: The Sino-American-Japanese relations and Asian Security.

This paper analyses an emerging interaction between bilateral and multilateral security arrangements for conflict resolution in Asia since the 1990s by emphasizing the correlation of Asian hegemony management with foreign policy strategies of the US, China and Japan. As protracted conflicts of the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits have threatened regional prosperity and stability, regional security institutions have become an important policy concern in the post-Cold War era. Detecting nascent multilateral institution-building in Asian regional security, this paper asks how and why US-led bilateral alliances interact with multilateral security arrangements such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN-Plus-Three. In order to examine this puzzle, the paper focuses on three points: (1) foreign policy strategies of three countries, (2) domestic interests concerning the feasibility and legitimacy of supplementing bilateralism with multilateralism in Asian security, and (3) impacts of Asian hegemony management on establishing regional security institutions. The paper compares the three countries’ preferences to regional security by focusing on the relationship between bilateralism of the US-led alliances and multilateralism. It then tries to demonstrate that both the dynamics of Asian hegemony management and the policy preferences concerning bilateralism and multilateralism are essential in understanding regional security arrangements in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]