A net assessment of east Asia

WHEN I began this series a month ago, I pointed out that the most significant feature of the global system currently is the ongoing destabilization of the Eurasian land mass, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Arabian Sea. One important aspect of this is that the destabilization isn’t, at this point, a single systemic crisis, but a series of relatively self-contained disorders. Thus the European, Russian and Middle Eastern systems have different dynamics, and while they touch on each other, they have not yet reached the point of having merged into a single crisis.

It is in this context that I turn to the question of East Asia. Asia is so vast and diverse and geographically fragmented that it is impossible to speak of Asia as a whole. East Asia is that part of Asia east of the Central Asian deserts that extend deep into China, and north of the Himalayas and hilly jungles east of the Himalayas. It consists of two main parts: One is the mainland, the region between the southern barriers and Siberia, which is Han China and its subordinate states, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. The other is the East Asian archipelago, a string of islands and peninsulas stretching from the Aleutians to the Malay Peninsula-Java interface. Of particular importance to an East Asian net assessment are Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan. One additional feature is noteworthy: the Korean Peninsula, wedged between China and the archipelago. In the simplest terms, at this moment, the critical question is the dynamic in the northeast, involving China, Japan, the Koreas and, of course, the global power, the United States.