38 North has just published my article exploring the relevance of European experience to regional security in Northeast Asia.

Faced by growing insecurity and destabilizing uncertainties, Northeast Asia lacks a regional mechanism to establish guardrails to manage the risks. The discussion about this is increasingly turning to the the European experience from a half-century ago in constructing a security framework in the form of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

At first look, the relevance is easy to grasp.

There was in Europe and is in Northeast Asia a prolonged military confrontation with a divided country, militarized borders, nuclear weapons, and mutual hostility and distrust. Despite all this, Europe found a means to keep enmity and hostility within bounds. Could Northeast Asia do likewise?

I argue that European experience in the 1970s offers an interesting model—but only if that model is properly understood.