South Korea calls for establishing regional security mechanism

Asian nations should make efforts to establish a regional security architecture to deal with nontraditional security threats such as energy, environment, cyber security and others, South Korea's defense minister Kim Kawn-jin said Tuesday. "Under the security circumstances, multilateral security cooperation based on mutual trust and understanding is very important for this region to grow into a prosperous community," said Kim during the opening ceremony of the 2nd Seoul Defense Dialogue. The three-day regional security forum is a vice ministerial- level multilateral security forum held first in Seoul last year, brought together around 180 high-level military officials and experts from 21 countries and three international organizations this year to discuss ways for enhancing security cooperation and military trust-building in the region, according to the Defense Ministry. Kim said although the Asia pacific region has gained a remarkable economic progress in the past few years, it is facing with increasing problems including ongoing arms race, territorial disputes and historical issues. South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won also said that to achieve the goal of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the denuclearization of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), all countries of the Asia- pacific region should get together to strengthen multilateral dialogues. Chung reaffirmed that DPRK nuclear weapons is an urgent issue and demanded it give up the nuclear ambitions and become a responsible member of the international community. In the panel discussion, South Korean vice defense minister Baek Seungjoo said the international cooperation is not a "zero- sum game", all the stakeholders of the region should go beyond win-win and turn more towards all-win strategy. "We should start with the experimental test on soft issues, especially on cyber security this time, to find out a mechanism benefit for all stakeholders of the region," Baek said. Today's forum specially held two cyber security sessions with topics of "The role of the military within the governance of the national cyber security" and "Directions for advancing the international rule of cyber security" separately attended by experts and officials from South Korea, China, Japan, the United States, EU and others. There is no surprise that all of the voices above echoed South Korean President Park Geun-hye's pursue of the "Northeast Asia peace and cooperation initiative", seeking to begin accumulating small but significant interactions in soft issues such as environment, disaster relief, nuclear safety and security and anti- terrorism then finally turn into habits of cooperation. But Han Yongsup, professor from national defense university noted that countries of this region still prefers bilateralism to multilateralism as they are not willing to cede their sovereignty in favor of supranational authority and institution. "The U.S. policy of maintaining and strengthening bilateral alliances for security and stability of the region still continues," said Han, added that impediments lie on the road to multilateral security cooperation in Northeast Asia, including competing political values and systems among countries, large gap of national power and potential rivalry among them.