After many years in which economic integration far outstripped formal cooperation in Asia, the last decade or so has seen a new flowering of cooperative ventures and an intensifying debate about the future regional “architecture.” Asia's New Multilateralism describes, explains, and makes predictions about cooperation in the region. This is a timely effort, and the book should be a useful resource for anyone interested in the international relations of the Asia-Pacific.

While most analyses have focused on economic issues or regional identity, this book has much more of a security orientation and focuses more on power and balance of power than on norms or institutional forms. As the editors state, “The reality is that Asia's new multilateralism is still at a stage where it is best understood as an extension and intersection of national power and purpose rather than as an objective force in itself” (p. 3). The book is also intended as not only an academic contribution but also a useful guide to policymakers and policy analysts. Even where the authors engage with scholarly debates such as constructivist analyses of regional identity, they draw on those debates to do policy analysis, rather than to become deeply involved in them. The volume is forward looking (as is, indeed, much of the literature, since tangible accomplishments are hard to come by so far), with many of the chapters making predictions or offering policy prescriptions.

The chapters should be understood more as reflecting the judgments and accumulated knowledge of their expert authors than as presenting novel research. While the book covers many topics, several themes stand out, including skepticism about the prospects for ambitious regional institutions and an apparent consensus that nontraditional security issues are at least as important—and as difficult to address through cooperation—as traditional security challenges in the contemporary Asia-Pacific. Virtually all of the chapters conclude that the regional architecture will be multilayered, with overlapping bilateral, subregional, regional (Asia or Asia-Pacific), and global institutions involved. In the end, they are also cautiously optimistic that most challenges to regional stability (the North Korean nuclear situation seems to be an exception) can be managed effectively through existing and emergent cooperative schemes.

Following an excellent introduction by the editors that justifies the state-based approach and discusses the various ways in which “architecture” can be understood, the book is divided into two parts. Part I, entitled “National Strategies for Regionalism,” is composed of chapters by regional experts that focus on the debates in individual countries or subregions (United States, China, Korea, Japan, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia). Part II, entitled “The Functional Challenges,” offers chapters that focus on broad issue areas, including economic cooperation, governance and democracy, and traditional and nontraditional security. This makes for a longish, occasionally repetitive book, but in the end I was convinced of the utility of following this dual strategy: The chapters in Part I offered much deeper insight into the national debates than would be possible in the context of chapters focused on issue areas, while Part II addresses actual cooperation.

The editors' decision to begin with chapters on national strategies reflects their judgment that governments remain the central actors in defining the regional architecture. This seems particularly appropriate for issues related to security and high politics, and indeed, most country chapters spend much of their time on strategic questions, although several authors make the case that inclusion in regional economic cooperation is an important strategic goal for governments as well.

Most chapters in Part I are of high quality, parsing out the various strands of the debates within countries (or subregion) and illuminating points of both agreement and disagreement among scholars and policy analysts. I found the chapters on China (by Wu Xinbo), India (by C. Raja Mohan), and Southeast Asia (by Amitav Acharya) particularly effective in covering the full range of issues and domestic debates, effectively preparing the reader for the issue-area analysis in Part II. Akiko Fukushima's chapter on Japan is also an excellent primer on how the Japanese foreign policy establishment understands that country's choices. Ralph Cossa's chapter on the United States does an outstanding job of addressing the U.S. strategic debate, but—perhaps reflecting the original premises of the project—it is more cursory with regard to economic issues. Lim Wonhyuk's chapter on the Korean Peninsula provides a good introduction to South Korean thinking on regionalism, but focuses especially on the policy shifts of the recent Roh Moo Hyun administration. Greg Sheridan's chapter on Australia is more journalistic in nature than the other chapters, but should be helpful to the many readers—including me—who know little about internal Australian debates. Overall, most readers with a reasonably good background in the international relations of the Asia-Pacific will not find much to surprise them in Part I, but they are very likely to deepen their knowledge.

The chapters in Part I are meant at least partly to provide background for the issue-area chapters of Part II. In this sense, Part II is really the heart of the book. The editors have made some wise choices in terms of chapter organization and thematic areas, but as always in edited volumes, the quality of the chapters varies.

Part II begins with a long chapter on the economic architecture that is the strongest in the book. Amy Searight addresses the emerging regional architectures in both trade and finance, clearly demonstrating the links and contradictions between the two types of cooperation. The chapter concludes that the evidence generally points to a continuation of the model of open regionalism that has served the Asia-Pacific so well over the last two decades. Nonetheless, Searight warns about threats to the World Trade Organization–based system in her thorough but highly readable discussion of rules of origin and other details of the preferential trade and investment agreements that have been concluded by regional economies.

If the other chapters in Part II are less satisfying than Searight's, this is partly because there is much less “there” in terms of regional cooperation on governance and security. That is certainly the case for William Cole and Erik G. Jensen's chapter on norms, regional institution building, and implications for governance and democracy in Asia. The authors do a nice job of drawing on academic literatures on international norm change and governance, as well as describing a variety of relevant regional efforts, many of which are not widely known among scholars of regionalism. Nonetheless, the chapter, while useful, is necessarily speculative and heavily qualified.

Mely Caballero-Anthony focuses on the governance challenges posed by nontraditional security (NTS) threats—infectious diseases, natural disasters, transnational crime and terrorism, and human security deficits—which, she argues, significantly overshadow traditional security threats in the region. She nicely outlines efforts by various regional groupings or combinations of states, but says too little about how the “problem-solving” approach she describes is working on the ground.

Michael E. O'Hanlon looks at the security architecture in terms of traditional security concerns, including balance of power and the role of the United States as a stabilizer. The chapter takes a more explicitly U.S.-centric approach than the others, which leads to a focus on maintaining regional stability while accommodating the rise of China through a combination of the U.S. hub-and-spokes alliance system and limited confidence-building measures to improve transparency. O'Hanlon expresses a concern that Japan's reticence to expand its contribution to regional and global security weakens the potential for an effective security architecture.

The volume ends with a chapter by Brendan Taylor and William T. Tow on impediments to the creation of an effective security architecture in the Asia-Pacific. This chapter lies uncomfortably between a substantive chapter and a conclusion, and in the end does not fully succeed at either. That said, it reiterates several of the main themes of the book and could be an interesting stand-alone assignment for a seminar.

In the end, this book holds together very well despite the variety of countries, institutions, themes, and problems that it addresses. It should become a standard resource for anyone who is trying to understand the present and future of conflict and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.