The weakening of global governance derives from a number of causes, but two developments stand out as being particularly influential: the systemic shift in the global balance of power from advanced democracies to emerging developing nations, and the gradual evaporation of US leadership. Both of these trends have served to steadily undermine the efficacy of the global system.

The earlier post-war rise of Germany and Japan did not threaten the global order or American pre-eminence in the way that the new, emerging states do today.

Tanaka concludes that the rapidly expanding influence of China and India, and other changes in the global system, is a serious challenge. The first step to ensure that this development does not seriously disrupt global stability will be to establish a region-wide architecture that is compatible with the existing rules and norms of the international system. Enmeshing East Asian nations in such a rules-based system will lead to a more stable and prosperous region and facilitate the further reform of global governance. World leaders must begin by asking themselves what kind of regional architecture would most effectively forestall the materialisation of any of these potential threats to regional and global stability and then stipulate a list of clear principles to guide the process.

Unfortunately, the United States continues to be distracted by issues in the Middle East and has failed to play an active leadership role in shaping East Asia’s transformation. The conspicuous absence of any sort of long-term vision for the region’s emergence or explanation of the kind of role the United States might play in its evolution militates against its prospects for influencing the outcome. In addition to making a greater effort to elucidate its preferences, Washington must also make clear to the world—particularly to Japan and its other friends in the region—that the United States continues to see East Asia as a region of strategic importance.

Although the spread of liberal democratic political systems throughout East Asia would certainly expedite East Asia’s integration into the existing global system, the reality is that democracy must remain a long-term objective.

For the time being, the focus should be on two complimentary fronts: working to prevent the materialisation of existing threats—that is, minimising risks—and working to deepen trust and increase prosperity by maximising opportunities that have emerged as a result of widespread economic liberalisation and regional integration.

In order to minimise risks, existing US bilateral security alliances with states in the region should be used as a hedge against the materialisation of potential ‘traditional’ security threats. Mini-lateral institutions, such as the trilateral forums for strategic dialogue between Japan, the United States, and Australia, and between Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States, ought also to be emphasised.

At the same time, leaders should expand multilateral cooperation on functional issues through inclusive region-wide frameworks. When combined with multilateral dialogue in the context of existing regional forums, proactive and cooperative action to address issues of common concern will go a long way towards strengthening intra-regional ties and consolidating trust and confidence among nations.

The critical element in these regional initiatives, Tanaka argues, is the creation of a new East Asia Security Forum to tackle transnational security issues such as maritime piracy, resource scarcity, disaster relief, environmental degradation, infectious disease, and nuclear proliferation.

Taking the Proliferation Security Initiative as a model, this new forum would adopt a proactive and operational approach to regional security. Member states would be bound together by rules and operations and cooperatively address shared threats through joint operations. It should be stressed that the proposed forum is not intended as a replacement for the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Rather, it would be designed to serve as a complement to—or even possibly as part of—the ARF, which has played an important role in facilitating regular region-wide ministerial dialogue for well over a decade. After all, the primary objective is not to create superfluous institutions but to engage regional states in substantive and action-oriented cooperation.

In order to ensure that the new forum’s mandate is not spread too thin, membership should be restricted to the ASEAN+6—that is, the 10 nations of ASEAN plus China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and India—and the United States. Given that the United States is not geographically situated in Asia, its membership may be met with some resistance from other nations in the region. However, it is abundantly clear that US participation is a prerequisite for this kind of action-oriented security institution to have a legitimate chance of success.