Avoiding World War III in Asia.

• Author: Khanna, Parag

World War II still hasn't ended, yet World War III already looms. When China and Japan agreed to normalize relations in 1945, it was stipulated that the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (a stting of uninhabited rocks equidistant from Japan, China and Taiwan) would not be militarized and the dispute would be put off for future generations. That future is here. The recent discovery of large oil and gas reserves under the islands has heated up the situation dramatically, with military budgets surging, and warships, coast guards and fighter jets scrambling to assert control over the commons.

Meanwhile, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have drastically escalated into the world's most dangerous flashpoint over the past seven decades precisely because the Korean War itself was never formally ended in 1953. Despite the recent summit between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, neither South nor North Korea has yet to formally recognize the other's existence, each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the entire Korean Peninsula. Similarly, the unresolved status of the princely state of Kashmir at the time of the partition of South Asia into independent India and Pakistan in 1947 has been the direct or proximate cause of three major wars and a near nuclear standoff in 2001 between the postcolonial cousins.

These three major Asian fault lines are a reminder that the biggest risk of conflict in the twenty-first century stems from unsettled conflicts of the twentieth century. Asia is awash in other still-disputed territories and boundaries such as Arunachal Pradesh (between India and China, which Beijing calls "South Tibet"), the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea (claimed by numerous Asian countries) and the southern Kuril Islands (where there is Russo-Japanese friction, with Tokyo calling them the "Northern Territories").

The world has been lucky that deterrence, economic integration and a shared distaste for the past two centuries of Western domination have prevented Asia's major powers from crossing the Rubicon. But rather than simply hope luck does not run out, the solution to these tensions is to immediately seek permanent settlement on peaceful terms.

Ending interminably hot or cold wars requires a different approach to diplomatic mediation than the ad hoc crisis management that has been the norm in these and other conflicts. Indeed, there is a significant leap from traditional mediation to outright settlement. Mediating conflict without a settlement is like turning down the temperature on a pressure cooker without switching it off: the food inside will eventually burn and rot. The tempetature can also be turned back up, causing the top to eventually blow off. By contrast, settling a conflict is like turning the stove off, removing the pressure cooker and getting on with sharing the meal. Strategists focused on alliance management and force posture would be well served to take a step back and remember that military maneuvering is not an end in itself. More fundamental than preparing for war is eliminating the need for it in the first place.

In the 1990s, as Western scholars celebrated the "end of history," a number of scholars advanced the idea that democratic societies do not wage war against each other--what came to be known as "democratic peace theory." Drawing inspiration from Immanuel Kant's On Perpetual Peace, which advocated a world of liberal republics, scholars like Michael Doyle, Bruce Russett, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and others demonstrated this significant historical correlation over time.

Democratic peace theory is both inspirational and aspirational: we should seek to build a world of peace among liberal regimes and societies. But at this moment in history, the theory is of limited applicability. Our purpose is not to test for peace among mature Western democracies but to generate peace among unlike regimes from dissimilar cultures--factors which further complicate strategic communication. We do not live in a liberal global order but a multipolar and multicivilizational one. Adversarial states do not view each other as democratic or peaceful. The structural landscape today lacks the cultural affinities of a world led by Western societies--which did, despite their shared roots, produce two World Wars. Additionally, absent are the domestic institutional constraints of checks and balances that have tended to slow democratic countries from going to war. There is an exception for nondemocracies since democracies declare war on them rather enthusiastically--the 2003 Iraq War just one recent case of how neoconservative values can belligerently weaponize ideas. Simply put: democratic peace theory helps...