Реферат: Asia International Relations Essay Research Paper International

(Nordpolitik) that was primarily designed to normalize its relations with the

Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, but was also intended to ease its frozen

confrontation with North Korea. During the Cold War the US regarded its military

position in the Korean peninsula as a pivotal buffer to protect Japan’s security

interests and to counterbalance strategic ascendancy of the Soviet Union and

China. According to Curtis, today “US troops serve as a buffer between the two

Koreas, as a check against Japan’s military expansion and as a message to China

and Russia that the US will remain a Pacific power. It is the most visible

evidence of the US resolve to protect US economic interests.” Hence, the

politics of the Korean peninsula, which have become so integral to the system

of international relations in Asia can be seen in terms of a whole set of

triangular interactions.

Russia

Another way in which strategic geometry is a useful concept for

understanding the transition from a Cold War to a post Cold War system is

through the disappearance and obsoleteness of some of the old triangles. Russia

is such as case in point.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has radically altered the face of

international politics in East Asia, beginning with Gorbachev who revised three

central features of post war Soviet policy in Asia by: 1. freeing it from the

albatross of Sino-Soviet conflict 2. by suppressing the dominating idea of an

East-West contest, shifted Soviet policy towards Japan. 3.by ending the Sino-

Soviet conflict meant that China was no longer the motivation for Moscow’s

preoccupation with quantity and quality of arms, and hence did away with the

significance of the Sino-Soviet-US triangle. “By altering Soviet priorities and

by changing with whom and for what reason the Soviet Union would compete,

Gorbachev brought an end to the pernicious geometry of the previous three

decades. Triangles, by definition, are inherently tension filled; they are

tripolarity with built in antagonism. Until, Gorbachev the quadrangle was in