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East Asia is richer, more integrated and more stable than ever before, whilst East Asian defense spending is now roughly half of what it was in 1990 and shows no sign of increasing. There is no evidence of any Asian arms race. All countries in the region are seeking diplomatic, not military solutions with each other. Yet this East Asia reality still runs counter to a largely Western narrative that views China's rise as a threat and the region as increasingly unstable. In this important book, David C. Kang argues that American grand strategy should emphasize diplomatic and economic relations with the region, rather than military-first policies. Using longitudinal and comparative data, statistical analysis, and intensive research in selected East Asian countries, he suggests that East Asia is in sync with the American desire to share burdens and that the region may in fact be more stable than popularly believed.

The puzzle : war and peace in East Asian history -- Ideas : hierarchy, status, and hegemony -- States : the Confucian society -- Diplomacy : the tribute system -- War : the longer peace -- Trade : international economic relations -- Frontiers : nomads and islands -- Lessons : history forward and backward

Over the past three decades, China has rapidly emerged as a major regional power, yet East Asia has been more peaceful than at any time since the Opium Wars of 1839-1841. Why has the region accommodated China's rise? David C. Kang believes certain preferences and beliefs are responsible for maintaining stability in East Asia. His research shows that East Asian states have grown closer to China, with little evidence that the region is rupturing. These states see China's rise as advantageous and are willing to defer judgment as to China's wishes and future actions. They believe that a strong Chi

AbstractIR 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.

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.

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

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.