Is Asia today like Europe a century ago?
In the final chapter of his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger had this to say about the outlook for peace in Asia: The relations of the principal Asian nations to each other bear most of the attributes of the European balance-of-power system of the nineteenth century. Any significant increase in strength by one of them is almost certain to evoke an offsetting maneuver by the others….The stability of the Asia-Pacific region, the underpinning of its vaunted prosperity, is not a law of nature but the consequence of an equilibrium which will need increasingly careful and deliberate tending in the post–Cold War world. While it lasted, Europe’s 19th-century balance-of-power system maneuvered the continent away from a self-destructive calamity. It also created the conditions whereby Europe achieved its maximum influence around the world. Yet that system ultimately collapsed in a great disaster, World War I. Bismarck’s complex diplomacy—19th-century Europe’s version of “increasingly careful and
