Asia's Arc of Advantage - icrier

India, on its part, must avoid the mistake of assuming that it is somehow immune to what
transpires in the maritime territorial disputes of the East and South China Seas. As ASEAN
has already recognised, pushing disputes down the road carries the risk of confronting an
even more uncompromising China. The urgency of establishing regional rules of the road that
contain the risk of miscalculation or accidental conflict cannot be overstated.
VI. Regional Architecture
It has become axiomatic to recognise that to achieve its potential as the world’s economic
powerhouse, Asia’s leading challenge today is to create regional institutions that address
insecurity, reduce prospects of conflict and promote collective action on non-traditional
security issues. 41
China’s long-standing preference has been to regard ASEAN-plus-three co-operation as the
core building block of East Asian architecture. The expansion of the inaugural EAS to ASEANplus-six
(2005) and subsequently to ASEAN-plus-eight (2011) has gone beyond China’s comfort
zone of building regional bodies it can dominate, like it does the Shanghai Co-operation
Organisation (SCO).
However, the EAS is still relatively weak and its future centrality in regional security architecture
undecided. It has remained limited to discussion of soft security issues (environment, health and
natural disaster mitigation), and is also largely unsupported by institutionalised mechanisms
for follow-up. EAS-led institutions are overshadowed by the multiplicity of ASEAN-plusthree
(APT) co-operation fora. Much work lies ahead in developing the EAS into the premier
institution for political and security co-operation in Asia.
In the chapter on “The Evolution of the East Asia Summit” included in this report, Sanjay
Pulipaka examines the gradual evolution of regional architecture over the past two decades
leading to the launch of the East Asia Summit in 2005. He also establishes the potential of the
EAS in meeting the demand for regional security architecture given its balanced composition.
Since APEC’s inception, the United States has backed this body’s role as the premier Asia-
Pacific economic forum. In the 1990s, the US was strongly critical of efforts to create an East
Asia Economic Caucus declaring that it would oppose any plan that “drew a line down the
middle of the Pacific and placed the United States on the other side of that line.” 42 It is not
surprising, therefore, that the US initially stayed away from the East Asia Summit process. It
was only in 2012, a year after the US joined the EAS, that it described this forum as a “premier
41 G. John Ikenberry, “A New East Asian Security Architecture: A Note From Our Guest,” Global Asia, March,
2010, available at http://globalasia.org/V5N1_Spring_2010/G_John_Ikenberry.html.
42 US Secretary of State James Baker’s statement, as cited in Claude Barfield, “The United States and East Asian
Regionalism: Competing Paths to Integration,” International Journal of Korean Studies, 2012, Fall, Vol. XVI,
No. 2, p. 158 available at http://www.aei.org/files/2013/01/08/-the-united-states-and-east-asian-regionalismcompeting-paths-to-integration_145424278672.pdf
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