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Zusammenfassung: Wie sehen die Chancen aus, Nordkorea mit militärischem oder politischem Druck zur Aufgabe seines Kernwaffenprogramms zu bewegen? Der Artikel befasst sich mit den unterschiedlichen derzeit diskutierten Optionen und gelangt zu dem Schluss, dass es keine überzeugenden Handlungsoptionen gibt, die dieses Ziel erreichen könnten. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass die Kim-Diktatur vorerst im Besitz von Kernwaffen sowie anderer Massenvernichtungswaffen bleiben wird. Selbst eine engere Abstimmung unter den USA und China dürfte nicht zu einer automatischen Denuklearisierung Nordkoreas führen. Es kommt derzeit eher darauf an, die gegenwärtige politische Eskalationsspirale zu entwirren und im bilateralen Austausch zwischen Washington und Peking nach Gemeinsamkeiten zu suchen und zu vermeiden, dass aus dem Konflikt über Nordkorea ein tiefgehendes strategisches Zerwürfnis zwischen beiden Ländern erwächst (von dem Russland profitieren würde).

While the Sino-Russian partnership has reached all-time heights, certain elements of an “axis of convenience” (Lo 2008) remain. For Realists, Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union can be regarded not only as counter-project to the European Union, but also to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BR). Russia’s longstanding strategy of military and economic hedging thus far has hampered stronger interconnections with a rising China. However, intensifying geostrategic competition with Washington has become the most important binding element between Moscow and Beijing. Sino-Russian soft balancing against the US has led to bi- and multilateral military exercises and the creation of novel international institutions that support their geopolitical and regional standing as well as Chinese plans for deeper regional integration via BR. Attempts for greater coordination of their regional strategies suggest that the axis Moscow-Beijing has emancipated itself from some of its past restrictions, a development beneficial for BR's prospects.

Current IR is a discipline of different schools of thought, which are entangled in “a protracted competition between the realist, liberal and radical traditions.” The proponents of these conflicting schools try to make sense of developments within the international realm or—in the case of die-hard constructivists and post-positivists—even claim that making sense of international processes and actions is a pointless endeavour. Manuela Spindler and Siegfried Schieder provide a very useful definition of this international realm, which also nicely connects to the previous chapter’s discussion on ontology. According to them, international relations are

Following the analysis of aggregate power in Chap. 5, it is now important to more closely evaluate the alleged power shift between Washington and Beijing based on a relational understanding of power. Grounded on the insight that gaps in the material (and non-material) national elements of power might lead to power differences in nation states’ bilateral relations, it is clear that researchers also have to look at this aspect when trying to identify a potential power shift. Taking the results of Chap. 5 as a confirmation that China’s aggregate power vis-a-vis the United States has indeed been rising since the end of the Cold War, the basic assumption of this part of the study’s analysis is that if China had managed to win the allegiance of middle powers in Asia-Pacific between 1992 and 2012 with regards to security and/or economic cooperation, this would have represented a relational power shift as long as the United States were unable to improve its ties to the regional middle powers simultaneously.

Has there been a power shift in Asia-Pacific as the brief US-Chinese navy encounter suggested? This study has addressed this puzzle by conducting the most extensive assessment of the alleged power shift in Asia-Pacific so far. It provided an extensive overview of some of the major Western texts on Sino-US competition, which overall suggested that we are in the midst of a power shift. As shown in Chap. 1, immediately after the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union altered the international system profoundly. Western scholars grew concerned about China as a new potential challenger to US primacy. This was particularly due to the growing Chinese economic and military profile. While not all of the authors addressed referred to China as a threat to US or Western interests, the number of authors concerned about Chinese advances both economic and the militaristic steadily grew. Particularly authors writing in a realist tradition warned about the effects of the diverging relative developments in both countries. According to them, this almost certainly lays the basis for further Chinese challenges to Washington’s leadership, both in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Section 1.2 demonstrated that authors who write in the liberal and constructivist traditions of IR also generally accept the strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. They likewise acknowledge that some kind of power shift between both nations is happening (however, in contrast to realist authors they do not believe that this dynamic leads necessarily to increasing militarisation, hostility and violence between China and the US in the long run).

After the previous discussion of the study’s theoretical framework, it is now time to address the research questions, particularly Q1. The basic assumption from the formulated research questions and the discussion in Chap. 3 is that if China’s aggregate power has accelerated since the end of the Cold War compared to that of the United States, then a power shift between the two nations has been taking place, a trend that would justify the worries of many authors discussed in Chap. 1.

Among the six nations identified as middle powers by conducting a cluster analysis of the CIAP, Pakistan has been part of this category since 1997. While Pakistan’s development in aggregated capabilities since the end of the Cold War seems impressive, it is necessary to investigate more precisely whether Pakistan satisfies the three criteria outlined in Chap. 4, namely a middle power’s control over resources, exercising responsibility in regional affairs and having military self-sufficiency.

Middle powers have been significantly less studied in IR than great powers and their international behaviours. In fact, the concentration of mainstream literature on great powers in the field of security has led to a great neglect of the role other states play in international relations; non-great powers have been mostly considered to be part of ‘the rest’. The major reason for this academic and public conduct is most probably the vast qualitative inequality among states, something that—despite legal admission about equality in many important texts of international law—reflects on international politics upon till today. In this context Robert W. Tucker noted that

As noted earlier, it was somewhat surprising to find Japan among the countries identified by cluster analysis as middle powers. But as discussed in Sect. 5.5, Japan was the only country in Asia-Pacific that experienced a significant and consistent decline in its relative position (between 14.3 % and 20 % depending on the scenario) compared to its 1992 positions in all of the four CIAPs, but was also identified as a middle power by cluster analysis as Sect. 6.2 shows. This outcome therefore serves as a reminder that the words of Morgenthau and Organski are still valid today, namely that the reputation of a nation might outlast its actual possession of power particularly in peaceful times. In the same vein Rose argued that “[t]he link between objective material power capabilities and policymakers’ subjective assessment of them remains murky” which is demonstrative of the subjectivity of public and sometimes scholarly assessments of the capabilities of nations. Andrew Hurrell explained that greatpowermanship “is a social category that depends on recognition by others”. Recently Gadi Heimann has shown that weaker states such as Prussia in 1815, Italy and Japan in 1919 and China as well as France in 1945 were perceived and treated as great powers by other international actors even though they lacked the necessary means. The fact that Japan’s relative position deteriorated between 1992 and 2012, as many other actors in Asia-Pacific improved their positions, supports the argument that public perception of Japan as a great power is still based on the country’s strong position of earlier decades.

‘Power’ and ‘shifts in power’ are two of the most common topics of debate in IR and a number of other fields. Before delving into the problem of how to decipher shifts in power, it is important to understand the difficulty in defining the concept of ‘power’ in IR. Most scholars of IR as well as political practitioners agree that “power is the platinum coin of the international realm, and that little or nothing can be accomplished without it.” While “the concept of power is central to international relations”, the majority of IR scholars nonetheless agree that “the nature of power remains a central puzzle for international relations theory.” Accordingly, for millennia the study of power has been an essential part of human philosophical endeavours: be they Greek generals, Indian philosophers or Roman and Chinese statesmen, they have all tried to answer questions regarding the essential nature of power, its sources and how to wield it most wisely in order to maintain and increase it.

Some scholars recently noted that South Korea (like Australia) comes closest to meeting the middle power ideal. Seoul is a “natural starting point for new middle power theorizing based on responses to the rise of China”, because it is “a particularly ambitious middle power” as well as a “strategically consequential middle power that lies at the epicentre of Asia’s continental and maritime divide”. Moreover, middle power diplomacy (jung-gyun-guk) has been present in South Korea’s foreign policy discourse for quite some time and following the words of Sung-han Kim, ROK Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Seoul “is actively practicing middle-power diplomacy”. Notably, in 1991 President Roh Tae-woo (1988–1993) declared South Korea would seek new roles as a regional middle power. Further, the k-means clustering in Chap. 6 has shown that Seoul has continuously made it into the middle power group since 1992. Moreover, the CIAP demonstrated the rise of South Korea’s aggregate power relative to the position of other regional states. South Korea has consolidated the position of an influential regional state, whose foreign policy elites have understood their nation to be a regional middle power since the 1990s. Scholars have likewise pointed to South Korea as a “middle-level power”. Before analysing the development of Seoul’s relations with Washington and Beijing since the end of the Cold War, whether South Korea justifies the middle power criteria outlined in Chap. 4 will be assessed, i.e. sufficient control over resources, exercising responsibility in regional affairs and military self-sufficiency.

Among the six countries identified by cluster analysis as being middle powers in Asia-Pacific, Australia was the country that consistently gained the highest relative ranking from 1992 to 2012. Moreover, as Table 6.3 showed, Australia was one of only two countries (the other being Japan) that were consistently identified by k-means clustering as middle powers in Asia-Pacific from 1992 to 2012. Additionally, when looking at the three criteria for middle powers set out in Chap. 4 (sufficient control over resources, exercising responsibility in regional affairs and military self-sufficiency), Australia seems to be—as I have already argued elsewhere—a middle power par excellence.

It was a warm, sunny day when the majestic grey aircraft carrier and the other 11 modern naval vessels of the flotilla crested the waves in a marginal sea belonging to the Pacific Ocean. Mist sprayed their bows like flakes of snow. The screeching gulls that had trailed the ships after they left port were long gone. The ships’ crews—several thousand men and women—were disciplined and conducted the ongoing combat drills of their battle group with unswerving routine. They were excited, had been well-trained for their mission and were honoured to serve their nation at sea. The ships’ banners displaying stars and stripes were waving proudly in the wind, telling a tale of their nation’s military prowess and long naval history. The officers on the bridge of the carrier were discussing the further developments of their maritime exercise, while enjoying cups of steaming hot tea.

Among the six middle powers identified in the cluster analysis, Indonesia has the weakest claim to be included. The country only made the grouping for the final year of the analysis (2012). It is thus important to be particularly careful and take a closer look at Indonesia’s standing following the three criteria identified by the discussion of the middle power literature.

Among the six states identified to be regional middle powers by cluster analysis in Chap. 6, Thailand has been in this group since 2002. Fittingly, authors have contrasted Thailand in earlier studies to more ‘traditional’ middle powers by describing it as an ‘emerging’ middle power, i.e. a middle power which is semi-peripheral, in-egalitarian and perhaps only recently democratised, yet demonstrates a particular amount of regional influence, works towards regional reforms (and not radical change) and shows a strong regional orientation while at the same time also constructing a national identity that distinguishes it from weaker regional states. Before examining at Thailand’s relations with the United States and the PRC, it shall again be quickly assessed beforehand whether Thailand also justifies to be a middle power following the three criteria—sufficient control over resources, exercising responsibility in regional affairs and military self-sufficiency—outlined in Chap. 4.

When looking at Asia-Pacific, a regional power shift seems to be taking place. Probably the most notable feature of this is the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, a major military power as well as a proactive player in various multilateral institutions and fora. Multiple authors have rightly described China as one of the most important forces for change both at the regional and global level. China’s widely discussed rise and the changing regional power balance caused by the Middle Kingdom’s impressive development have indeed altered the global perceptions of the geo-politics and geo-economics of Asia-Pacific. On the one hand, this is due to the greater role China is now playing beyond its own region. More importantly, however, this is one the other hand also strongly related to the growing possibility that the US-led regional order in Asia-Pacific may be challenged (and permanently altered) by an increasingly confident Chinese leadership. This cannot only be exemplified by the installation of new intergovernmental bodies by China. At least equally important in this regard is the fact that China has actively been working towards shifting the established order in its nearby neighborhood. Developments in the South China Sea (SCS) are of primary importance in this regard. Accordingly, the disputes in the SCS need to be better understood in order to develop a more comprehensive grasp of the broader power play that takes place in Asia-Pacific.

Within the last two decades, China has been the most seriously debated emerging power seen by academics, politicians and large parts of the public alike to be able to effectively challenge the dominant position of the United States of America (US) in global as well as Asian-Pacific affairs. Indeed, after having enjoyed a brief moment of global unipolarity following the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Washington’s current situation has changed remarkably. Some points are particularly worthy to be mentioned. To begin with, the world’s former hyperpuissance (Hubert Vedrine) has to recover from the worst global economic crisis since 1929. The US unemployment rate is up to almost 10% (far away from the 4% in 2000), its federal budget deficit is estimated to reach 1.4 trillion USD in 2011 (Younglai 2011) and total outstanding public debt skyrocketed to 14.7 trillion USD in September 2011 (US Treasury 2011). Secondly, the US continues to be heavily engaged in large military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military missions in these two war-torn countries do not only continue to cost US tax payers much money and account for the death of hundreds of US soldiers and local civilians, but – more important from a strategic perspective – have bogged down the US military for some years to come. Finally, Washington is confronted with an increasingly assertive and economically rising China in Asia-Pacific, a region that according to high-ranking US politicians has “become more closely interlinked than ever before” (Obama 2009) with the fortune of America, “is a key driver for global economic growth” (Kirk 2009) and a place, “where much of the history of the 21st century will be written” (Clinton 2010).