The Ukraine War and Northeast Asia

I f we have learned anything about the international relations of Northeast Asia since the end of the Cold War, it is that exogenous shocks to the system can be highly disruptive to assumptions about the emerging regional order. Many scholars and governments expected an intensification of U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry in the early years of the George W. Bush administration, for example, but the events of September 11 shifted U.S. strategic priorities in a new direction. Rather than designating China as a “strategic competitor” as the Bush campaign had promised, the 2002 U.S. national security strategy declared that, while the United States would remain attentive to the possibilities for great-power rivalry, the common threat of terrorism gave an unprecedented opportunity “to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.”1 The 2008–9 global financial crisis had an equally profound impact on China’s assumptions about the emerging regional order, convincing leaders in Beijing that the Western democracies were incompetent and that the United States was entering a period of secular decline. This reignited greater geopolitical rivalry rather than cooperation. At first, the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to confirm Beijing’s thesis that the East is rising and the West declining, but later phases of the pandemic undermined confidence in China’s own secular rise while reinforcing U.S. strategies for technology decoupling from China and closer U.S. alignment with allies and partners. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fourth major exogenous shock to Northeast Asian order since the end of the Cold War. In terms of national security, it is likely to be the most profound. One is always tempted to draw such conclusions when in the midst of a crisis and lacking perspective,2 but in this instance there are several reasons to expect that the impacts of