Economics and security: foundations for comprehensive regional security

Asia’s economic and political security has been shaped by and achieved with deep regional integration and cooperation. The reemergence of great-power rivalry, the disruption of the geopolitical status quo and a protectionist United States represents the biggest economic and political challenge to Asia since the end of the Cold War. Governments have resorted to traditional security responses—unwinding economic interdependence, prioritising military deterrence as a means of avoiding conflict, weaponising economic interdependence for coercive purposes or securitising economics to protect from its weaponisation and threatening military force to achieve political ends—and that risks global political and economic fragmentation, or worse. Renewed commitment to Asian regionalism could set a course that reinforces international political stability and economic prosperity. This will require rearticulating the goals, principles and commitments of that regionalism. Regional security and prosperity can be achieved with a shared goal of comprehensive regional security: a vision of collective security for the region’s states that draws upon the antecedents of comprehensive national