Jeju Peace Institute

LEE Jaehyon(Research Fellow, Asan Institute for Policy Studies)

This study examines the implications of the Track 2 diplomacy for Korea’s major diplomatic strategies, including the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative and the Trust-Building Process on the Korean Peninsula, by shedding fresh light on the roles of CSCAP, the most representative track 2 meeting in the Asia-Pacific region. CSCAP has played a significant role in enabling regional powers suffering from a lack of trust in the post-cold war era to build up and maintain security cooperation through ARF among other initiatives. Track 2 specialists, who are relatively independent of their own national interests, have discussed regional security issues and provided feedback to regional governments, promoting security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, their discourse has also contributed to identifying new security issues and informing governments in the region about them. An irony of this success is that the room for CSCAP to maneuver has continued to shrink while trust has built up among governments to some degree over time. The fact that in the Asia-Pacific region other opportunities have arisen for security experts to meet and discuss has also contributed to some extent to this decline in CSCAP’s significance. Nevertheless, the CSCAP experiences have great implications for Northeast Asia, which is suffering from a shortage of cross-border trust and cooperation. In Northeast Asia, where international dialogue is still a challenge, if track 2 dialogue and hard security issue discussions there are accepted as supplements to nontraditional or soft cross-border security discussions, it will be possible to further promote cross-border cooperation and the buildup of trust in Northeast Asia.