Mikheev, Vasily V

Abstract
The paper deals with the analysis of the following five issues: – The Northeast Asia situation during the Cold War era; – The hierarchy of threats and challenges in NEA at present; – The third nuclear test in North Korea (reasons, consequences, and threats); – The North Korean political future through the prism of the collapse of the Soviet Union; – Northeast Asian security and cooperation prospects. The main ideas of the paper are firstly that the North Korean regime is historically doomed and secondly that Northeast Asia urgently needs the fiveparty (China, South Korea, Russia, the USA and Japan) cooperation on peaceful regime change in North Korea. The third main point this paper makes is that talks on sharing responsibility among these Five for the future development of North Korea into a “normal” country is the basis for unification (The “Yalta conference” on North Korea). The paper advocates the theory that the most beneficial strategy for NEA’s future is a peaceful change of the North’s regime through a total engagement policy as well as the other measures mentioned above. Once this occurs new security prospects for the creation of a new multilateral security cooperation in NEA could open up. The American idea of “rebalancing” towards the Asia Pacific could bring a new meaning; that of the establishment of a security network in NEA on the NEA-5 cooperation formula “(Russia + China) + (US+(ROK and Japan))” (NEA5CF) in order to tackle new security threats and challenges and to create a proper atmosphere for a comprehensive and creative co-development in NEA.
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