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There are some generalizations about the end of the Cold War which are widely believed but are greatly misleading. The following five are among the most popular misinterpretations of the Cold War’s ending: (1) The Cold War ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991; (2) The Reagan Administration’s military build-up forced the Soviet Union to concede defeat in the Cold War; (3) The Soviet Union’s inability to compete with the West economically left it with no option but to reform; (4) A Western ideological offensive against Communism, led by Ronald Reagan with important help from Margaret Thatcher, forced the Soviet Union to change its thinking; (5) If Mikhail Gorbachev had not been chosen as Soviet leader in March 1985, some other Soviet leader would have had to pursue similar policies and the Cold War would still have ended largely on Western terms.

This article explores the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in Asia from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It argues that, unable to contribute much economically, Moscow had had to rely on its military posture to project power in the region. In the 1960s-70s, the main Soviet preoccupation in Asia was the containment of China. To this end, the Soviet leaders pursued regional alliances with India and Vietnam while seeking to engage the United States and Japan in a broad anti-Chinese front. These efforts had mixed results. While the Soviets made impressive gains with India and Vietnam, Soviet-Japanese relations stalled over Moscow’s unwillingness to compromise on the territorial issue, while the US capitalized on the Soviet fears of China in order to play the two Communist countries against one another. Soviet policy began to change in the early 1980s when, in view of the Soviet Union’s growing international isolation, Moscow attempted to re-engage with China. The painstaking process of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement led to full normalization by 1989, opening the stage to a closer relationship between the two countries, which continues to the present day. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev positively responded to South Korea’s normalization probes. Even Soviet-Japanese relations, though still stalled over territorial problem, experienced a degree of revival. However, Gorbachev’s tendency to de-emphasize military power led to the decline of Moscow’s regional influence, which continued through the 1990s. Renewed investment in power projection under Vladimir Putin has brought Russia back to the table in Asia as a generally unloved but respected Asian player.

This paper starts with the realisation that East Asia, since 1980, has been successful in preventing fatalities of organized violence compared to other regions, and compared to its performance three decades before 1980. The paper proceeds by establishing the recipes for the long peace of East Asia: non-interference, and developmental definition of state’s purposes. Once there is clarity of the East Asian recipe for peace, this paper moves to the contribution of the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity and similar forums to the East Asian strategy for peace. There the conclusion is that Forums like the JFPP can offer support to several of the elements of the East Asian peace formula. Finally, the paper will investigate whether the East Asian and Jeju recipes for peace and prosperity could offer global prescriptions. Again, the conclusion is clear. The world could learn from East Asia and Jeju: some of the recipes that Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity supports, can be found useful also to the entire world.