Northeast Asia faces various traditional and non-traditional threats, which are made more intractable by the competition and animosity of the regional states. Pressing issues include dealing with North Korean submarine proliferation and improving the response to regional maritime natural disasters, urgently requiring comprehensive cooperative measures. This session is intended to formulate solutions to such challenges. President Park Geun-Hye has announced an important regional strategy, the “Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative” (NAPCI), to encourage and consolidate direct and indirect regional cooperation. If this vision is to fruition, however, we must develop an exceptionally effective system of regional maritime cooperation, with greatly expanded intraregional connectivity fashioned around the particular geographical characteristics of Northeast Asia.
This session hopes to identify practical and functional building blocks of cooperation, which can be synergistically combined to implement the specific themes and strategies of the NAPCI. We firmly believe that only through much closer maritime cooperation, as articulated by the NAPCI, is there any prospect of building consensus and stabilizing the Northeast Asian region: there is no alternative route to peace and prosperity.