Paradigms and Fallacies: Rethinking Northeast Asian Security and Its Implications for Korea.

This paper examines the changing characteristics of the fundamentally distrustful, conflict-ridden, and power and interest-centric international politics in Northeast Asia and their implications for the region's stability especially in the post-Cold War era. No doubt that the power and interest-centric realist paradigm maintains its explanatory dominance in capturing the lack of reconciliation or institutionalization of regional cooperation both in postwar and post-Cold War Northeast Asia. When it comes to prescribing for the lack of institutionalized multilateralism or security cooperation, however, the analytic power of realist perspective becomes "sterile." It is so because realists assume the goals, values and preferences of the units or nation states as largely fixed or determined by the anarchical international system. Such a realist paradigm has frequently led to a self-fulfilling prophecy: as if inevitably pressured by the system, states pursue their narrow and myopic national interests, further exacerbating security dilemma for all concerned. Strikingly pronounced indeed is the continued primacy of such contending national interests in Northeast Asian affairs, as manifested in the North Korean nuclear deadlock and the close integration of Japanese foreign policy with America's global anti-terror war. The present paper scrutinizes, in particular, the uniquely increasing trend in military spending in post-Cold War Northeast Asia as a way of further documenting the ominous changes as well as the problematic consequences of fallacious policy paradigms underlying the concerned state behaviors. To help prevent the security dilemma from spiraling into a slippery and perilous path of arms competition requires the concerned states and their policymakers to switch their realist assumptions, redefine their self-interests, and learn to embrace international societal norms and perspectives which build on reality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]