A new forum for peace.

• Author: Bremmer, Ian

NORTHEAST ASIA now faces a series of critical security challenges. China's remarkable 25-year economic-reform effort has profoundly increased Beijing's economic, political and military influence in the region. Some fear that in response Japan will more aggressively assert its regional interests. At the same time, South Korea is now formulating a foreign policy that moves the country beyond its traditional role as a compliant U.S. ally, a change that could bring Seoul into diplomatic conflict with both Washington and Tokyo.

Finally, North Korea remains a dangerous, isolated and unpredictable country, as the six-party talks continue to fluctuate between hope and confusion. And looming over the region is the flashpoint of energy: The increasing demand in all of the countries of northeast Asia, particularly China, for secure supplies of energy heightens political tensions, sharpens unresolved territorial disputes, and creates fertile ground for misunderstanding and conflict.

In some ways, northeast Asia today evokes Europe at the turn of the 20th century, where rising regional powers, territorial conflicts and troubled bilateral relations led to fifty years of catastrophic violence. Some have argued that rising economic interdependence and substantial levels of foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly between China and Japan, make the current situation in northeast Asia less volatile. After all, between 1980 and 2003, FDI in Asian countries grew from around $4 billion to more than $100 billion. However, the absence of a multilateral security architecture capable of mediating conflicts and reducing tensions remains a pressing problem. And America's bilateral relations in the region have grown more complicated in recent years, leading some to question whether the United States by itself can serve as an effective arbiter.

Asia's existing multilateral organizations cannot fill this vacuum. The unwieldy structure and geographic reach of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) make it too broad to serve effectively as an instrument of northeast Asian diplomacy. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Plus Three (ASEAN+3) is a smaller, better-focused organization, but it does not include either the United States or Russia and concentrates its efforts on the resolution of Southeast Asian problems. The December 2005 East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur will address broader Asian concerns, but neither the United States nor Russia will take part. The United States, South Korea and Japan have, since 1999, effectively coordinated their North Korean policies via the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG). In fact, as TCOG's success suggests, the network of U.S. bilateral alliances across Asia represents perhaps the only effective existing institutional security structure in Asia. But TCOG confines itself to a relatively narrow agenda--it does not cover energy issues, for example--and it does not include China or Russia.

IT WAS North Korea's nuclear program that brought together the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea in a multilateral format--albeit an ad hoc one--to address a major threat to the peace and stability of northeast Asia. The format for these discussions--working-level meetings that dealt with specific challenges and opportunities with an eye toward reaching a common cooperative goal--offers a useful model that could be broadened.

In our assessment, the North Korean negotiations definitively demonstrate the need for a more permanent five-party northeast Asian security structure that would bring together under one roof the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. This is why we think that the six-party talks on North Korea...