An experience organizing a weeklong conflict resolution dialogue among Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, North American and Japanese participants in December 2025 in Okinawa, which is home to extensive U.S. military bases, reminded me of the constant fear and unspeakable suffering endured by local communities under conditions of heightened regional insecurity. As an incessant succession of fighter jets roared overhead during our discussions, it was difficult not to connect the presence of these bases to the perceived adversaries they are intended to deter and confront. Most striking in this regard was the public display of solidarity on the global stage among Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the military parade held in Beijing in early September 2025, commemorating the eightieth anniversary of China’s 1945 victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.

More recently, from late December 2025 through early January 2026, China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted intensive military exercises involving live ammunition in zones of airspace and waters encircling Taiwan, in protest against Washington’s approval of U.S. arms sales to Taipei worth eleven billion dollars. Taken together, these developments illustrate a troubling reality: distrust, polarization, and militarization are growing significantly throughout Northeast Asia.

These events also underscore the inherent dangers of the prevailing logic of deterrence – an approach that seeks to ensure one’s security through a credible display of threatening capacity designed to dissuade a perceived adversary from taking harmful actions. The fundamental problem with deterrence lies in the security dilemma it inevitably produces: contending powers continuously attempt to outmatch one another while lacking any effective mechanism to arrest the escalation of mutual threats, suspicion, and fear.

In response to these challenges, policymakers, scholars, and civil society actors have called for the establishment of a Northeast Asian Conference on Security and Cooperation – a sustained, multinational, intergovernmental framework for dialogue on shared regional security concerns, aimed at confidence building, risk reduction, and conflict prevention.

In May 2025, for example, Japan’s Komeito Party released........

© Eurasia Review