national-interest-based foreign policy premised on Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East, where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional economic and social
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