Post-Cold War

1. Asia Pacific has been enjoying relative peace security & prosperity. PRC has full diplomatic relations with all pacific Rim countries. PRC & Vietnam have embarked upon economic development & economic reform.

2 PRC, the only Asian nuclear power, its extraordinary economic growth, its rapid armed forces modernization. Its intention is tobecome the dominant power in Asia in 20-30 years. To achieve such a position, it must first build up an economic capable of sustaining such grand ambition. To do that, PRC needs a long period of peace and stability.

3. Potential conflicts :

- Russian-Japaneses dispute over Kurile Islands,
- Sino-Japan dispute over the Senkaku Islands,
- Vietnam-Malaysia boundary disputes of their off-shore demarcation line,
- South China Sea.

4. Economic friction between Tokyo-Washington do not seem to endanger their bilateral security alliance. China is turning into an economic giant. Its is at present the third biggest economy only slightly below Japan. By 2020 China will have surpassed Japan. Japan, Asia's economic superpower is starting to convert its wealth into political power and potentiall a military power.

5. Economic strength will be the defining feature of power in the next century. People & Governments of Asia Pacific preoccupay themself with bussiness of making money. It is mistake of seeing military power as irrelevant in modern world.

6. Very strong element of rising Japanese power will be economic in nature - can US reduce this economic strength without hurting itself ?. Japan does not matter as a military power because of Japanese constitutional inhibition on deployment of offensive military power. But Japan is nevertheless an economic superpower.

7. Russia possesses a great conventional military capacity and a big nuclear arsenal but economically is in shambles. Only the US is a complete superpower in thatt it possesses military, political and economic strength. While China is a rising superpower.

8. Russia & China are no longer revolutionary state in that they have basically given up the mission of spreading communism wouldwide. Japan obviously has no ideology of any kind. Economism, not evangelism is Japan's primary goal.

9. While a key aim of the ARF is to " engage " China within a multilateral security structure, it is far from certain that China wants to be engaged on terms laid down by ASEAN. Anyway, prospects for regional stability in Asia-Pacific region depend critically on :
- transparent,
- predictable, and
- cooperative pattern of interaction among the region's major power.

10. The ARF can contribute to this process by developing norm and principles of inter-state behavior and measures of transparancys, confidence building and preventive diplomacy.