The U.S. Rebalance and the Seoul Process
How to Align U.S. and ROK Visions for Cooperation in East Asia
January 2015 , 10 Pages
- Report
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Overview
In the spring of 2013, South Korean President Park Geun-hye proposed the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI), a forum for institutionalized cooperation that the region currently lacks. Park identifies three main challenges that must be addressed to resolve the tensions in Northeast Asia: the possibility of an arms race or rising political competition between China and the United States, the failure of Japan to definitively address historical issues tied to its past aggression within Asia, and the failure to establish a stable inter-Korean relationship.
Through NAPCI, South Korea aims to define its nascent leadership role within East Asia, even as it acts in concert with the United States to reinforce shared objectives such as nonproliferation and promotion of maritime dispute management mechanisms—goals central to the U.S. rebalancing effort. Likewise, participation in NAPCI provides the United States with an important new regional platform that is exclusively dedicated to subregional cooperation on these issues.
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