Toward A Northeast Asian Conference On Peace And Security – OpEd

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 the Peacebuilding Vision of Komeito, which identifies three long-term foreign policy priorities: the abolition of nuclear weapons, AI regulation, and the creation of a regional security conference for Northeast Asia. Komeito’s proposal explicitly draws inspiration from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), initiated by Finland in 1972. That process culminated in the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act – a comprehensive set of agreements on European confidence-building measures – and later evolved into the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 1995. Today, the OSCE brings together fifty-seven participating states in ongoing dialogue, confidence-building measures, and cooperative security practices, despite significant challenges.

This vision finds support from Izumi Nakamitsu, UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, who endorses coordinated efforts to realize a Northeast Asian Conference on Security and Cooperation (video link). While emphasizing the need to reflect the region’s distinct historical, cultural, and geopolitical realities – rather than replicating the European CSCE/OSCE experience – High Representative Nakamitsu highlights the usefulness of a progressive approach: initiating and linking multilateral security dialogues among willing parties and through Track 2 channels, thereby paving the way over time for a more stable, comprehensive, and eventually institutionalized process of regional security dialogue.

Consensus has yet to emerge on the precise composition of such a conference. My proposal envisions seven core participants – China, the United States, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Mongolia – as member states, with practical arrangements to ensure meaningful Taiwanese participation. Membership could expand gradually over time, while keeping the door open for North Korean engagement.

As defined here, the Northeast Asian region contains multiple political and security fault lines and seemingly existential divisions, most notably in relations between North and South Korea, the United States and North Korea, Japan and North Korea, and Taiwan and mainland China. Beyond these, U.S.–China relations – together with U.S.–Russia relations – presently show increasing warning signs that mismanagement could rapidly escalate into systemic, or even existential, tensions with severe global implications. A sustained Northeast Asian security conference, if realized, would therefore need to be highly practical, adaptive, and mutually beneficial, capable of accommodating these entrenched divisions and ultimately addressing them constructively. At present, this task may appear daunting.

Yet three recent regional efforts point to institutional foundations and diplomatic precedents, suggesting that meaningful progress toward realizing this vision is not beyond reach.

• From 2003 to 2009, China hosted and played a leading role in the Six-Party Talks on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, facilitating intensive negotiations among North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia, and Japan. This high-level diplomatic process emerged in response to the acute security crisis triggered by North Korea’s formal announcement in January 2003 of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Although the parties issued a Joint Statement in September 2005 – in which Pyongyang declared its intention to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs – subsequent nuclear and missile tests by North Korea, combined with deepening mutual distrust among the parties, ultimately led to the termination of the talks by 2009.

• Since 2014, Mongolia has annually hosted the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue on Northeast Asian Security, convening government officials, former officials, and scholars from China, North and South Korea, Japan, and Russia to discuss regional security issues. Participants from the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions are also regularly invited, creating a rare and valuable venue in which North Korean representatives can engage with a wide range of counterparts. Unlike the Six-Party Talks, the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue is not designed as a negotiation but as a forum for exchange, learning, and confidence building.
• Since 2005, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – an eleven-member organization as of October 2025 – has annually convened the East Asia Summit (EAS). The EAS brings together ASEAN leaders and eight non-ASEAN participating states: the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Although North Korea is not included, the EAS provides a sustained, high-level platform through which Northeast Asian leaders regularly meet with their Southeast Asian counterparts to discuss regional security challenges and issue public statements on the outcomes of their discussions.

These three examples of high-level regional dialogue are illustrative but still instructive for the proposed Northeast Asian security conference. Taken together, they demonstrate both the feasibility and practicality of sustaining regional dialogues – such as the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue and the East Asia Summit – that parallel key components of the proposed regional security conference in form and function. It is also noteworthy that the latter two stand in sharp contrast to the high-stakes, outcome-driven negotiations exemplified by the ultimately aborted Six-Party Talks.

A comparative view of these three examples also highlights the enduring role of “soft power” – the exercise of influence and leadership through dialogue and persuasion rather than coercion – by non-threatening conveners such as Mongolia and ASEAN member states. This observation echoes the catalytic roles played, presently or historically, by Qatar, Oman, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, and Singapore as strategic conveners and facilitators of consequential dialogues among conflict parties. One implication for the proposed Northeast Asian security conference is the value of identifying a mutually acceptable initial host – perhaps Mongolia, or potentially Japan or South Korea – that is distinct from the region’s most influential powers, particularly the United States and China.

While the need for a proposed regional conference as an antidote to overreliance on deterrence is increasingly evident, the likelihood that Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and other centers of power will readily adopt such a vision in the near term remains low. In the short to medium term, what we – as willing actors from civil society, government institutions, and academia – can do is build and expand a regional network of influential opinion leaders from each proposed member state who are committed, or at least open, to this vision.

More specifically, this preparatory effort would involve a multinational team of skilled, experienced, and mutually trusted trainers working alongside designated administrative staff and supported by sustained funding – sources for which need be identified – to regularly convene and facilitate professional workshops. These workshops would be conducted within individual member states in their respective languages, and across states in English as a shared working language. They would be designed to equip professionals – drawn from government and diplomatic institutions, the military, political parties, think tanks, educational and academic institutions, media organizations, and civil society groups – with practical problem-solving skills to promote regional security.

Using a highly experiential and participatory approach to learning and relationship building, the workshops would introduce applied conflict analysis and resolution skills, culturally sensitive leadership skills, and inclusive policymaking and policy advocacy skills through a combination of scenario-based simulations and field-based experimentation. Current regional security challenges – such as those across the Taiwan Strait, on the Korean Peninsula, and in the South China Sea and East China Sea – as well as obstacles to realizing the proposed vision, would serve as hands-on case studies.

Recurring workshops for both returning participants and new cohorts would gradually create a growing network of skilled, connected leaders and professionals – within and beyond government institutions – who would consistently highlight the need for, and feasibility of, a sustained regional security conference while also responding to emerging security challenges within and across member states.

Having served as a conflict resolution trainer for government, diplomatic, military, and civil society participants for over twenty-five years in the Asia-Pacific and beyond, I am deeply convinced that, if adopted at scale, these sustained capacity-building and networking efforts would be far more cost-effective and mutually reassuring than traditional security measures in enhancing regional security.

Delivered at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan on 18 Dec 2025

• This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS)