"Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's three largest economies converge around the unstable pivot of the Korean peninsula, is a region rife with political-economic paradox. It ranks today among the most dangerous areas on earth, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. Yet in the face of long-standing historical antagonisms and geopolitical tension, the rapidly growing region is nevertheless emerging as an identifiable economic, political, and strategic entity in its own right, and cooperative trilateral mechanisms among Japan, China, and Korea are deepening. As the locus of both economic growth and political-military uncertainty in Asia has moved further to the northeast, the need has arisen for a book focusing analytically on prospects for collaboration within Northeast Asia specifically, rather than generalizing solely about Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific regional relationship. This book provides exactly this explicit Northeast Asian focus, while also offering a more general theory for Asian institution building, and policy suggestions for coping with a historic new development in world affairs." -- back of book.