The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

Robert Ross of Boston College reaches a more optimistic conclusion about the future of East Asian security. He focuses on the role of geography and structure in maintaining the current East Asian balance of power into the twenty-first century. Ross argues that U.S.-China bipolarity in the region will continue for at least the next quarter century. East Asia's two lesser great powers, Russia and Japan, will not be able to challenge this regional bipolarity because they "lack the geopolitical prerequisites to be poles." Although the United States and China may challenge each other in the future, the combination of "regional balancing trends, interests conditioned by geography, and the mitigating influence of geography on the security dilemma" bodes well for regional stability and relative peace in the decades to come.