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Trilateral security cooperation among Japan, Australia and the United States has accelerated over the last few years, with the first foreign ministerial meeting held in early 2006. Not unexpectedly, the new cooperation between Canberra, Tokyo, and Washington is often characterized as a revival of Containment (against China, this time) or a mini-NATO in Asia. The paper will examine this latest development in East Asia’s security relations, with a specific focus on Japanese policymaking. The concept of a democratic state as one form of state identity will be given particular attention for understanding Tokyo’s attitude toward trilateral security cooperation, as well as the new security order in Asia. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an examination of the dynamics of multilateral military alliances or 'coalitions'. Framed within the wider debate over the future security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region, it has the dual objective of both enriching the academic debate and offering guidance to policy-makers by investigating the theory and practice of coalition behaviour. The article expounds the case for the American-Japanese-Australian combination and analyses the issues that confront such an alliance-coalition using two competing theoretical perspectives of allied behaviour: 'balance of power' and 'intra-alliance politics'. The main propositions of these perspectives are empirically tested against policy statements based on American, Japanese and Australian foreign and defence policies and associated academic writings. The paper demonstrates the continued validity of realist-conceived approaches to security provision and concludes that both theoretical perspectives are useful tools of analysis in this case. Focusing on separate levels and therefore different aspects of allied behaviour, they can in fact be viewed as complementary, rather than competing, and clearly exhibit strong potential for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers in the US, Japan, and elsewhere have recently taken limited steps toward the realization of a quadrilateral strategic alliance between the US, India, Australia, and Japan. The development of such an 'Asia Democracy Partnership,' supported in ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]