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State Formation in Korea and Japan, 400-800 CE State formation in Korea and Japan occurred a thousand years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation and learning, not bellicist competition. Korea and Japan emerged as states between the 4th and 8th centuries CE and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war or suppress revolt – the longevity of dynasties in these countries is evidence of both the peacefulness of their region and their internal stability. Rather, Korea and Japan developed state institutions through emulation and learning from China. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. Why? We focus here on diffusion through a combination of emulation and learning: domestic elites copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy.

Neither war nor preparations for war were the cause or effect of state formation in East Asia. Instead, emulation of China—the hegemon with a civilizational influence—drove the rapid formation of centralized, bureaucratically administered, territorial governments in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Furthermore, these countries engaged in state-building not to engage in conflict or to suppress revolt. In fact, war was relatively rare and there was no balance of power system with regular existential threats—the longevity of the East Asian dynasties is evidence of both the peacefulness of their neighborhood and their internal stability. We challenge the assumption that the European experience with war and state-making was universal. More importantly, we broaden the scope of state formation in East Asia beyond the study of China itself and show how countries in the region interacted and learned from each other and China to develop strong capacities and stable borders.

IR theorizing about international order has been profoundly, perhaps exclusively, shaped by the Western experiences of the Westphalian order and often assumes that the Western experience can be generalized to all orders. Recent scholarship on historical East Asian orders challenges these notions. The fundamental organizing principle in historical East Asia was hierarchy, not sovereign equality. The region was characterized by hegemony, not balance of power. This emerging research program has direct implications for enduring questions about the relative importance of cultural and material factors in both international orders and their influence on behavior—for describing and explaining patterns of war and peace across time and space, for understanding East Asia as a region made up of more than just China, and for more usefully comparing East Asia, Europe, and other regions of the world.

Scholars have been particularly hampered in their explanations and understanding of Asian security because they often learn little about Asia in their graduate training. The international relations (IR) literature draws an overwhelming proportion of its empirical source material from the European historical experience. We show that the curricula and training that graduate students of international relations receive in the United States are overwhelmingly focused on European examples. In short, the median American scholar of IR is deeply comfortable with European examples and analogies and has almost no exposure to Asian examples and history. Thus, when faced with Asian examples, they are considered within the context they are taught: through the European lens. We conclude with a call for greater attention to the empirical reality that is Asia.

What has been the impact of Donald J. Trump’s presidency on the place of the United States in East Asia? Trump already has shown a proclivity for upending the mainstream American consensus about grand strategy to East Asia, with the real possibility of a trade war with China or a shooting war with North Korea on the horizon. However, this article will place President Trump’s first year in office into a larger context of long-term decline of U.S. leadership and influence in East Asia, arguing that this trend has been underway for quite some time, and that Trump has not altered fundamentally this trajectory. Some of Trump’s actions may accelerate a decline in U.S. leadership, but by no means was Trump the first nor will he be the last U.S. president to deal with a swiftly changing East Asia. The region has been changing rapidly for decades, and there are no indications that this will stop anytime soon. However, continuing and gradual U.S. withdrawal from leadership does not mean less American-East Asia interaction. East Asia will remain the most important trading and investment region for the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

Are power transitions between a rising power and a declining hegemon particularly volatile? Is a war between China and the United States possible or even likely as a power transition draws near? Sc...

The reality is that powerful business and political clans are deeply embedded in Korean society and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

How much war was there in early modern East Asia? This article empirically corroborates characterizations of relations between Sinic East Asian polities as being unusually peaceful and stable, which we attribute to the participants’ shared subscription to a common and accepted hierarchy framed by a Confucian worldview. More broadly, we provide direct empirical evidence that international hierarchies derive their stability from cultural consensus rather than simply asymmetries in material power. We make these claims by addressing the extent, range, and patterns of war in early modern East Asia by introducing and describing an extensive dataset of over 1,100 entries that measures war and other violence in early modern East Asia from 1368 to 1841 and relies principally on both Chinese and Korean language sources. The combination of these two Asian language sources forms the basis of a unique dataset that will substantially widen and complement the largely Chinese or English language sources that are generally used in debating war in early modern East Asia. Asia was composed of much more than simply China, and bringing in scholarship from other areas of early modern East Asia reflects a trend of moving past national studies to research the region more holistically.

States interact in a multiplicity of domains, and most of them are not military in nature. Situating the security domain alongside economic and social domains of interaction among countries is important for creating a full analysis of a state’s priorities in a particular region, or with any particular other state. Failure to appreciate the nonmilitary dimensions of international relations in Asia in particular can lead one to misdiagnose the prospects of conflict and cooperation, potentially leading to tragic spirals. Data on East Asian defense spending over twenty-five years appears to present a puzzle: by many measures, East Asian military expenditures have declined significantly over the past quarter century. This finding appears starkly at odds with the conventional wisdom that Chinese bellicosity, its expenditure on anti-access/area-denial capabilities, and the United States’ reallocation of forces are increasing tensions in the region. Any policy of cross-domain deterrence that fails to appreciate interactions across the full multiplicity of domains of international intercourse risks courting deterrence failure.

This chapter argues that different international systems with different organizing principles have existed and may exist again; and that the East Asian international system experienced measurably different patterns of war, trade, and alliances. In the Westphalian system, anarchy leads to a Hobessian world of incessant war of all against all, equality is not only most stable, but is also inevitable and normatively sought, and those equal and identical units – nation-states – lead to a balance of power system. China stood at the top of the hierarchy, and there was no intellectual challenge to the rules of the game until the nineteenth century and the arrival of the Western powers. Two common criticisms about scholarship on historical East Asia are that the system was not called the tribute system at the time, and that the tribute system itself was not an all-encompassing complete set of norms and institutions that were used everywhere by everyone.

In premodern East Asia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China rarely experienced anything like the type of religious violence that existed for centuries in historical Europe, despite having vibrant religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and numerous folk religions. How do we explain a region in which religion was generally not a part of the explanation for war and rebellion? A unique data set of over 950 entries of Chinese and Korean violence over a 473-year span allows granular measurement of religious violence. I argue that the inclusivist religions of historical East Asia did not easily lend themselves to appropriation by political leaders as a means of differentiating groups or justifying violence. Addressing the paucity of religious war in historical East Asia is theoretically important because it challenges a large body of scholarly literature that finds a universal causal relationship between religion and war that is empirically derived mainly from the experience of only Christianity and Islam. In contrast, it may be that certain types of religious traditions are less amenable to mass mobilization for violence. Moving beyond Christianity and Islam to include East Asian religious traditions promises both to address a potentially serious issue of selection bias and also to be a rich field for theorizing about the relationship between religion and war.

Long understudied by mainstream international relations (IR) scholars, the East Asian historical experience provides an enormous wealth of patterns and findings, which promise to enrich our IR theoretical literature largely derived from and knowledgeable about the Western experience. The intellectual contributions of this emerging scholarship have the potential to influence some of the most central questions in international relations: the nature of the state, the formation of state preferences, and the interplay between material and ideational factors. Researching historical East Asia provides an opportunity to seek out genuine comparisons of international systems and their foundational components. This introduction surveys the field and sets out to frame debate and the intellectual terms of inquiry to assess progress and guide future research. Theoretically, the essays in this issue provide insights on the emerging literature on hierarchy in international relations, and move beyond simplistic assertions that power “matters” to explore the interplay of material and ideational causal factors. Methodologically, scholars are no longer treating all East Asian history as simply one case, while also becoming more careful to avoid selection bias by avoiding choosing selective evidence from the rich historical record. Collectively, the empirical cases discussed in this volume span centuries of history, include a wide variety of political actors across East Asia, and represent an exciting wave of new scholarship.

A wave of recent scholarship, built on rich empirical research, provides new perspectives on enduring questions about North Korea. Three books, in particular—Patrick McEachern's Inside the Red Box, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland's Famine in North Korea, and Suk-Young Kim's Illusive Utopia—present a comprehensive and panoramic vision of North Korea today. This essay reviews these books and makes two overarching arguments. First, North Korea is more “normal” than is often thought, and its domestic politics, economy, and society function in ways familiar to other countries around the world. When viewed from the inside out, North Korea's institutions, economic life, and its people act in ways that are not only similar to those of others around the world, but that differ only in their level of intensity. Second, North Korea's continuing nuclear and military challenge is only one aspect of its overall relations with the world, and policies designed to minimize its threatening military behavior may work at cross-purposes with policies designed to improve its economy and the lives of its people. The complexities that arise in dealing with North Korea create a number of contradictory policy choices, and making progress on one issue has often meant overlooking another, or even allowing it to become worse.

The East Asian “tribute system” from 1368 to 1841 comprised an enduring, stable, and hierarchic system, with China clearly the hegemon, in which cultural achievement was as important as economic or military prowess. Most significant is the recognition that the Chinese tributary order was in fact a viable and recognized international system with military, cultural, and economic dimensions that all intersected to create a very interesting and stable security system. Recently it has become fashionable in historical circles to question the viability of the tributary system in part because scholars have become increasingly aware of the realties behind Chinese rhetoric. However, more nuanced studies and new interpretations only serve to underscore the centrality of the system for its participants. This paper demonstrates that there is a hierarchical relationship—generated by a common culture defined by a Confucian worldview—in place in the context of China and the East Asian states and helps clarify the distinc...

This article examines both South and North Korea's search for status in international relations. By exploring how these countries seek status for themselves, how states define status for themselves and others, and also what status they are willing to grant other regional states, this paper concludes that crafting a stable regional status hierarchy will be as important to future stability on the Korean peninsula as will be the crafting of a stable balance of power or deepening economic interdependence.

Although the Northeast Asian region is more stable now than during the Cold War, significant unresolved issues remain. Most significantly, North Korea remains a security and economic problem for the entire region. In addition, unresolved territorial and historical disputes, how to deal with China's emergence, and whether the USA will retain its leadership position, are all issues on the agendas of states in the region. This article will address those four issues, and argue that neither realism nor liberalism provide a comprehensive explanation for the relative salience and importance of these issues. Alternatively, I argue that identities and interests are central to explaining both the sources of stability and potential instability in East Asia, and that relative capabilities and economic relations, while important, do not provide a clear picture of the fundamental dynamics in the region. What states want is more important than how powerful they are, and it is the question of state intentions, and how they view their own position in the world and their relationship to their neighbors, that will ultimately determine whether Northeast Asia continues to move toward stability or slides into instability.

The scope of Lee's foreign policy, and the type of change he achieves, will depend as much on the factors constraining him as on his own ideas about how best to govern.

In exploring how inter-Korean relations would evolve in the absence of a U.S.-ROK alliance, this essay focuses on three areas: preferences of the South Korean public and elite regarding how best to deal with North Korea, whether North Korea might pull back on its hesitant moves toward economic reform and a more open diplomacy, and how Chinese foreign policy toward the Korean Peninsula might evolve.

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.

Although some observers may perceive that Japan increasingly supports sanctions, Washington risks misunderstanding the source and depth of that support, which rests in the abductee issue, not the U.S. Japanese alliance.

Scholars in the field of international relations tend to treat the contemporary Asian system as if it emerged fully formed from nothingness in the post-World War II and post-colonial era. This essay explores a major historical epoch—the Asian international system from 1300 to 1900. During that time, the Asian international system was both intensive and extensive, in both interactions and relations between Asian states. Thus, understanding and incorporating this system into our theories of international relations is critical. To date, scholars have rarely described the main features of this system. In this article, I attempt such a task, and will also draw implications for mainstream international relations theories. In short, the research in this essay reveals that the historical Asian international system was stable and hierarchic in nature. The main theoretical finding is an alternative to the balancing proposition. That is, the findings in this article present a major empirical challenge to th...