North Korea’s recent rocket launch received few congratulations and many condemnations, including the recent UN censure. Although Pyongyang did not manage to put a satellite into orbit, it did succeed in getting the world’s attention. It has sustained this attention by kicking out nuclear inspectors, vowing to restart its plutonium processing program, and declaring an end to its participation in the six-party talks.
It might seem like the worst possible time for Tokyo to think big. The global economic crisis is hitting Japan hard. The current government of Taro Aso is scraping the bottom of public opinion polls.
Just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was arriving in Asia this week, Pyongyang was threatening to test a long-range missile. That’s its way of saying, “Don’t ignore us!” North Korea’s nuclear program is not in the top tier of foreign policy issues facing the Obama administration. The new team in Washington believes it has to deal with other priorities — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global economic meltdown, climate change, and Middle East peace — before it can address the North Korean conundrum.
North-east Asia is a critically important locus of geopolitics, but it lacks a regional security structure.
“Right now seems to be a relatively quiet moment in East Asia regarding historical controversies,” observes Daqing Yang, a professor of Asian history at George Washington University and a participant in a Sep.15 seminar on historical dialogue and reconciliation sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and the university’s Sigur Centre. “But just a few years back, heads of state canceled their summit meetings because of a visit to a particular shrine in Tokyo or because of history textbooks.”
Northeast Asia heaved a sigh of relief at the latest news of a breakthrough in the nuclear negotiations with North Korea. The prospects of integrating North Korea into the international community and constructing a peace and security structure for the region have never been rosier.